THE ANCESTRY OF THE HORSE 135 



fresh are his remains, and so much Uke those of the 

 mustang, that the late Professor Cope was wont to say 

 that it almost seemed as if the horse might have lingered 

 in Texas until the coming of the white man. And Sir 

 William Flower wrote: "There is a possibility of the 

 animal having still existed, in a wild state, in some parts 

 of the continent remote from that which was first 

 visited by the Spaniards, where they were certainly 

 unknown. It has been suggested that the horses which 

 were found by Cabot in La Plata in 1530 cannot have 

 been introduced." 



Still we have not the least little bit of positive proof 

 that such was the case, and although the site of many an 

 ancient Indian village has been carefully explored, no 

 bones of the horse have come to light, or if they have 

 been found, bones of the ox or sheep were also present to 

 tell that the village was occupied long after the advent 

 of the whites. It is also a curious fact that until the dis- 

 covery of the Prjevalsky horse in Central Asia, in 1879, 

 there was no evidence that truly wild horses had Hved 

 down to the present time, unless indeed those found on 

 the steppes north of the Sea of Azof be wild, and this is 

 very doubtful. But long before the dawn of history the 

 horse was domesticated ia Europe, and Csesar found the 

 Germans, and even the old Britons, using war chariots 

 drawn by horses — for the first use man seems to have 

 made of the horse was to aid him in killing off his fellow- 

 man, and not until comparatively modern times was the 

 animal employed in the peaceful arts of agriculture. 

 The immediate predecessors of these horses were con- 

 siderably smaller, being about the size and build of a 

 pony, but they were very much like a horse in structure, 

 save that the teeth were shorter. As they lived during 

 Pliocene times, they have been named "Pliohippus." 



