ORIGIN OF DOMESTICATED ANIMALS 215 
horse, while able to maintain himself against wolves in Asia, is 
not able to withstand the puma, which has exterminated the feral 
horses in certain localities of South America. 
All this, however, is but ancient history, and now we can only 
speculate upon what would have been our misfortune and our 
condition had the prehistoric horselike animal become extinct 
in Asia, as he did in the rest of the world, and we had been 
obliged to get on without the horse.1 
Since his domestication the horse has doubtless changed but 
little. He is larger, stronger, and swifter, but structurally he 
seems to have been for a long time a finished animal. Under 
domestication he has developed the trot, until with some breeds 
it is an instinctive gait. This is a great tribute to breeding, for 
the trot is not a natural gait with animals of the horse kind, 
except for a few steps between the canter and the walk. 
However early the domestication of the horse, — and it must 
have been very early, — its introduction into modern historic life 
is comparatively recent. For example, the Egyptian carvings 
and frescoes show nothing of the horse until after the close of 
the rule of the shepherd kings (1800 or 1900 B.c.), when that 
country first came into contact with Assyria. In Xerxes’ army 
even the Arabs were mounted upon camels. The Hebrews had 
no horses until about the time of Solomon and after their ac- 
quaintance with the Syrians. The earliest human records of the 
horse are the Assyrian sculptures, where, curiously enough, the 
horseman is accompanied by an attendant who leads the horse, 
an attention which would be greatly scorned by his Cossack 
representative of to-day, as it would by any rider not the merest 
novice, showing that we have improved somewhat in horseman- 
ship since the old Assyrian days. 
The ass (Equus hemionus and Equusasinus). In eastern countries 
the ass has long been a favorite beast of burden, antedating the 
horse by many centuries. In our own country this animal has 
1 It will add to our appreciation of the horse if students will choose this 
topic for an occasional composition. 
