ORIGIN OF DOMESTICATED ANIMALS 211 
know that the whole pack was upon his trail, not following 
straight but circling round him in a gradually narrowing and 
ultimately fatal spiral ; for, gaining confidence with exertion and 
whetted hunger, the pack will ultimately make the charge at a 
favorable moment after the quarry is at bay and shows the first 
evidence of defenselessness. This is the natural method of the 
shrewdest and most cowardly hunter the forest of nature ever 
produced, and it is perfectly natural that such an animal should 
have been not once but many times domesticated. Thus came 
the dog to dwell among us. 
The horse (Equus caballus). Unlike the dog, the horse has no 
near relative in the wild ; that is to say, there is no existing wild 
species that, by any stretch of the imagination, could be regarded 
as the direct progenitor of the modern horse, or from which the 
horse could by any possibility be developed.! If all the dogs of 
the world should disappear, they could be reproduced from the 
wild ; but if the domestic horse should disappear, he could not be 
restored from any other existing species. 
While the immediate progenitor of the horse is, and likely 
has been for a long time, extinct, yet two significant facts re- 
main. The first is, that he was almost certainly developed from 
some primitive stock in or near the semiarid plains of Central 
Asia, having wolves for his nearest neighbors and_ principal 
enemies. The other fact is equally significant ; namely, that 
while the immediate progenitor is lost, we really know more of 
the ancestry and evolution of the horse than of any other animal 
domesticated or wild, living or extinct.? 
1 Objection might be made to this statement on account of the Tarpan, or 
so-called wild horse, which has been known on the steppes of Tartary and 
eastward to Central Asia certainly since the time of Pallas (1760), though it is 
now confined to the more remote regions of the interior. These animals are 
true horses; and if they are aboriginal stock, they are to be regarded as the 
real progenitor of our domesticated race. It is more than likely, however, that 
they are feral rather than truly wild. 
2 For a more extended account of the origin of the horse and his evolution 
upward, see “ Principles of Breeding,” pp. 298-305. 
