37 
WELSH PONIES AND COBS. 
Prehistoric and Earliest Day Phases. 
The history of Welsh Ponies and Cobs at first glance presents 
a field for operations almost illimitable in extent. 
A writer might start with an investigation as to the form of 
life, if any, in the shape of type or proto-type, which existed at 
the time when great glaciers radiated from the heights of 
Snowdon, and fiung themselves with their stony fragments into 
the valleys below. He might only desist from those efforts 
when he had completed a review of his own particular ideas 
upon the merits or demerits of the latter-day showyard 
winners. 
From a geological point of view, Wales is perhaps more 
noted as a happy hunting ground for the mollusc hunter, but 
it is quite erroneous to imagine that, though she may have 
specialised in these marine form directions, she has unearthed 
no evidences of the mightier beasts of an ancient day, for it 
is a fact that in the two Gower caves in Glamorganshire, 
Paviland and Spritsail Tor, in the former of which was dis- 
covered the “ Red Lady of Paviland,” were found ( inter alia) 
the detached hard prismatic molar teeth of at least two species 
of Equus — the Equus caballus and Equus asinus. 
It was not so with the other osseous remnants of former 
animal life which were scattered about the floors of these rock 
dens. They for the most part had been gnawed into a state of 
comminuted splinter, and so dental more than skeletal evidence 
was only forthcoming. Sufficient, however, was found to 
establish the fact that the characteristic quartenary represen- 
tatives of the Perissodactyle family of Equidce, with the 
contemporaneous Pachydermata ruminantia , and the larger 
sized carnivora were common enough, not only in South Wales 
at Gower, but also in North Wales, at Bryn Elwy, in the Cefn 
caves, in which were discovered the teeth and astralagus of an 
undetermined species of this same equine family. As there 
were two kinds of men in the Pleistocene days — the river drift 
