ARABIAN HORSES. 259 
Upton concluded that the horse was found in Arabia 
“not later than about one hundred years after the 
deluge, . . . if indeed he did not find his way there 
immediately after the exodus from the ark, which is 
by no means improbable,” and this probability the 
author then proceeds seriously to consider. Accord- 
ing to Major Upton and a few kindred spirits, all 
other breeds are mongrels, and the only way to obtain 
horseflesh in its best and purest form is to go back to 
the fountain head, to the horse of the desert. 
Naturalists, I believe, have not yet determined 
where the genus originated; but they gather that 
three allied animals, the tapir, the rhinoceros, and 
the horse, have all descended from a common ances- 
tor of the eocene period. Of these three, the tapir 
and the rhinoceros certainly are found in many parts 
of the world. The immediate precursor of the horse 
was the small animal called Equida, which was ex- 
ceedingly common both in America and in Europe. 
Fossil skeletons have also been found in almost every 
part of America, varying but slightly from the skel- 
eton of the present horse, although externally the 
animals which they represent may have differed from 
him as widely as does the zebra. It is possible, 
therefore, that, contrary to the usual opinion, horses 
existed on this continent in a wild state before the 
coming of the Spaniards. These facts as to the wide 
distribution of both the ancestors and the first-cousins, 
so to say, of the primitive horse, tend to show, al- 
though of course they fail to prove, that he also was 
only a part of which, however, is devoted to horseflesh ; and a paper 
concerning Arabian Horses, published in Fraser’s Magazine for 
September, 1876. 
