OEDEE OF PACHYDEEMATA. 
183 
rather the kings, along the coast of Asia Minor were zealously 
addicted to horse-dealing, and they have done their part to 
spreading far and wide the famed Arab blood. Armenia also 
furnished Horses to the early dealers of Tyre and Sydom Cyrus 
collected together in his stables 800 stallions and 1,600 mares. 
The Humidian Horses were also celebrated for the elegance of 
their shape and the swiftness of their pace, characteristics pre- 
served by them to the present day. 
The invention of the art of horsemanship is ascribed to the 
Scythians. When that nation made its first appearance in Greece, 
the inhabitants of Thrace were struck with surprise and dread, 
imagining that the man and the animal formed one and the 
same body, unquestionably this is the origin of the Centaurs of 
mythology. We find the same apprehension and the same dread 
existing among the American savages, when the natives of the 
Mexican coast saw for* the first time the troopers of Fernando 
Cortes disembark upon their shores. 
The remote epoch to which we can trace back the Horse being 
employed as a domestic animal renders it very difficult to determine 
its original country. For a long time it was assumed to be 
Arabia, but historical facts and other considerations deduced from 
the nature of the Horse render this hypothesis improbable. At 
the present day, we are generally led to consider the Horse as 
originally a native of Asia, and that it appeared for the first time 
either on the vast central plateau which occupies so large a space 
in this quarter of the globe, or on the steppes to the north-east of 
the Caucasus. As the originally wild Horse does not exist in any 
country, it is quite as impossible to recognise its primeval traces 
in historic times, as to state with any certainty the native country 
of the first Oxen, the first Goats, the first Pigs, the first Sheep, or 
the first Hogs. 
There are, however, droves of Horses free and unowned living on 
the plains of Asia and the pampas and prairies of America ; but all 
zoologists agree in considering them as the descendants of certain 
domestic races, somewhat modified in their shape and habits by 
having reverted to a state of liberty. At the date of the dis- 
covery of the Hew World, it is certain that no animal of the Horse 
genus existed there ; at the present day, on the contrary, we 
find immense hordes of them, which, through their wild and ex- 
