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NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS. 



The Origin and Influence of the Thoroughbred Horse. By William 

 Bidgeway, M.A., F.B.A., &c. Cambridge : at the University 

 Press. 



A book on this subject was distinctly wanted, and these pages 

 constitute a volume which will be regarded for a long time to 

 come as one of considerable referential value. Most Englishmen 

 are supposed to know something about a Horse, though few do 

 so even in a general way, as may be well understood by studying 

 that immense gang of nondescript gamblers who infest every 

 racecourse, and degrade a great and useful sport ; these indi- 

 viduals, as a rule, are ignorant of even the points of a thorough- 

 bred Horse. Many real horsemen, on the other hand, are 

 equally without an adequate conception of the origin of the 

 animal they love so well ; and there are naturalists who perhaps 

 know least of the species which may almost be said to have 

 created some of our national instincts. At all events, it is 

 generally held that the Arab Horse was the ultimate source of 

 our thoroughbred and half-bred Horses, a view which Professor 

 Bidgeway holds has " no historical foundation, that the Arabs 

 had only got their fine breed of Horses from North Africa at a 

 period later than the Christian era; and that, on the other 

 hand, there was the clearest evidence of the existence in Libya 

 of a fine breed of Horses for a thousand years before the Arabs 

 ever bred a Horse." That the Libyan Horse is the stock from 

 which all the best Horses of the world have sprung is the text of 

 this book, and in support of the thesis a vast material of informa- 

 tion relating to both prehistoric and historic times has been 

 compiled and arranged. 



Among the many commentators on the Book of Job, Pro- 

 fessor Bidgeway apparently strikes a new suggestion that the 

 writer of that poem, with all his wealth of imagery concerning 

 the war-Horse, did not know the Horse in his own land — sup- 

 posing that to be Arabia Petrsea — but derived his knowledge of 



