580 PROFESSOR J. C. EWART 



had left the tail of this particular animal in what seems to us an unfinished 

 condition. 



Further evidence of the existence of horses of the Steppe variety we have in 

 osseous remains found in the Pleistocene deposits of the Rhine valley. 



If the Steppe horse was in the south of Europe towards the end of the Palaeolithic 

 period, it doubtless about the same time reached in Asia as far south as the Himalayas. 



If it is admitted that horses of the Steppe type ranged from the south of Europe 

 to the Himalayas about the end of the Palaeolithic period, there is no difficulty in 

 accounting for the horses of Spain, South- Western Asia, and Northern India having 

 to-day very marked affinities to the wild horse (E. prejvalskii) now limited in its 

 range to the western portion of the Great Gobi Desert. 



I have already stated that the Forest variety has played an important part |in 

 forming the Shire and Clydesdale horses. It may now be added that it has»almost 



Fig. 4. — Outline of a horse carved on a piece of horn from the Madelaine Cave. This horse, in its head, and especially in its 

 "roughened" tail, forcibly suggests the wild horse (E. prejvalskii) which still inhabits the Great Gobi Desert. 



certainly taken part in forming all kinds of horses : (1) in which the back is long — 

 includes six vertebrae in the lumbar region ; (2) in which the hind-quarters are 

 rounded and the tail set-on low ; (3) in which the metacarpals are short and wide, and 

 the fetlock joints thick, the pasterns short, and the hoofs broad ; and (4) in which there 

 is a short, broad, dished face, which, as in the elk, becomes prominent above the level 

 of the nostrils (fig. 5). 



Evidence of the Forest blood is especially common in the north-west of Europe, 

 in, e.g., the Gudbrandsdal and fjord horses of Norway,* in the stout, thick-set horses of 

 the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (PL III. fig. 9), in the thick-set Shetland ponies, 

 and in the small, long, and low horses of the Faroe Islands and Iceland. Further, the 

 Forest type, in a nearly pure form, is also represented in Korea and other parts 

 of Asia. 



In Pleistocene times horses of the Forest type were common in the south of 

 England. In the British Museum may be seen the upper portion of the skull of a 

 Forest horse from Ilford, Essex, and a number of metacarpals from Kent and Essex 



* Marshall, " The Horse in Norway," Proc. Roy. -Soc. Edin., vol. xxvi. pt. 1. 



