REVIEW— THE NATURALIST’S LIBRARY. 
617 
My heart is awed within me, when I think 
Of the great miracle which still goes on 
In silence round me. The perpetual work ' 
Of Thy creation finished, yet renewed 
For ever! 
But we pass on to the domestication of the horse ; and here it 
is probable that the author’s philological researches have been of 
some service in determining in what country he was first sub- 
dued ; and this, according to his opinion, was achieved in central 
Asia, about the fortieth degree of latitude, from whence riding 
and charioteer nomads have incessantly issued, penetrating to the 
east, the south, and the west, from periods evidently anterior to 
historical record, almost to our own times. “The natives of 
high Asia,” he says, “were inventors of the bridle, of the true 
saddle, of the stirrup, and probably of the horseshoe. With 
many of them, a horse, a mare, and a colt, were fixed at a nominal 
standard of value ; such was once the case among the Celtse. 
“The whole people are mounted,” continues he, “ and do nearly 
all their domestic work in the saddle ; they cross rivers by hold- 
ing their horses’ tails, or, fastening them to rafts or boats, convey 
themselves to the opposite shores, sometimes several miles 
distant. Of all the races of man, they alone eat their flesh, 
drink the milk of mares, and know how to convert it into cur me 
(an intoxicating beverage). They marry on horseback ; their 
councils meet on horseback ; and declarations of war, treaties 
of peace or alliance, are dated from the stirrup of the sovereign.” 
Mr. Youatt, in his “ History of the Horse,” has maintained 
that the Egyptians were the first people who tamed the desert 
horse ; and the author of the volume before us, evidently with an 
intention of disproving it, enters into a long critical research con- 
cerning the names bestowed upon animals of this family in the 
most ancient known languages : “ in the Hebrew, for instance, 
the word pra, para, pered , perdah, meant either an ass, mule, or, 
more properly, a riding beast ; and comparing them with paras , 
horses, and Parassim , Persians, later Parthians — that is, horse- 
men - we see,” he says, “ that the root has a more eastern origin, 
and belongs to a people coming from the regions of Hendukoh, 
whose name was derived from the quality of riding or charioteer- 
ing ; in a secondary sense, an exalted people, and was connected 
with a dialect, if not Sanscrit, at least Zend or Pelheri, not re- 
mote from Msesogothic and Teutonic, where pherd, perd, paert , 
are dialectical variations of the same origin, and even the Latin 
ferro is not an alien. We may therefore,” he says, “ suspect 
that pra , para, &c., in common with many other Indo-Sacian, 
Germanic, or Scythic words, abounding in the Arabic and other 
