644 
REVIEW. 
Quid sit pulchrum, quid turpc, quid utile, quid non. — lion. 
The Naturalist’s Library, Vol. xii. 
The Natural History of Horses — The Equidce, or Genus Equus 
of Authors. By Lieut. Col. Charles Hamilton Smith, 
K.H. and K.W., F.li. and L.S., President of the Devon 
and Cornwall Natural History Society , fyc. fyc. 
The historians of days of yore were very indifferent natural- 
ists, since very little is known of the early history of the horse, 
connected with the early progress of mankind — such as the 
sources whence they first obtained the animals, and subsequently 
subjugated them. It is highly probable that they were not sub- 
dued to the purposes of man at a very early period of the world ; 
for, from the best accounts that can be obtained of the early pro- 
gress of human population, it is probable that the hunter state was 
the second stage to which mankind arrived ; and it is not reason- 
able to suppose that the horse was subdued until this epoch, since 
they must have made some progress in the arts ere they could 
have attempted to have mastered the desert-born courser. In the 
earlier stages of society, the necessity of hunting acted as a prin- 
ciple of repulsion, causing men to spread with the greatest rapidity 
over a country, until the whole became covered with scattered 
settlements ; and this will partly account for the circumstance of 
horses being discovered in every part of the old world at a very 
early period. 
The author of the volume before us is of opinion that the 
“ primitive habitat” of the horse, as well as his first domesti- 
cation, was central Asia ; and he comes to this conclusion bv a 
critical dissertation on the names bestowed on these animals in 
the most ancient languages. 
As to the primitive habitat of the horse being discovered by 
such means, it is altogether out of the question. The author 
himself clearly proves, in the discussion on the fossil remains of 
the equidee, that they have been found over an immense surface 
of the old world, from Eastern Tartary to the west of Iceland — 
from the polar regions to the south of the Himalaya mount- 
ains, and to an unknown distance in Africa, in company with 
the fossil relicts of mastodons, rhinoceroses, tigers, elephants, 
