34 
W. J. MARTIN. 
SOME REMOTE ANGESTORS OF THE HORSE. 
B. Dr. W. J. Martin, Kankakee, Ill. 
A Paper Read before the Illinois State Veterinary Medical Association. 
During the last few years the science of paleonthology has 
made such rapid advance, that by its aid we are able to trace 
the ancestors of some of our domestic animals to a very remote 
part, and to prove beyond a doubt that the present horses 
possessed by them have only been arrived at by a series of 
gradual changes or evolution from a very simple origination to 
to the highly complex one they possess to-day. To no animal 
can the law of evolution be applied better than to the horse; 
in fact, the horse family may be considered as furnishing an 
almost positive proof of the correctness of that theory. It was 
long one of the dogma of natural science, even up to the 
beginning of the Nineteenth Century, that previous to the 
discovery of the Western Hemisphere by Columbus, no horse 
had ever existed thereon. These reasonings were most effect¬ 
ually disproved by Buckland in “Beachey’s Voyage to the Pa¬ 
cific in 1831,” in which he found the fossil remains of horses 
frozen in the cliffs of Eschsholtz Bay, Alaska, and which there 
is good reason to believe were the ancestors of our present 
domestic horse. The next account we have of fossil horses is 
by Chas. Darwin, in 1832, in his voyage round the world in the 
ship “Beagle.” He found in the Prmpean deposits of Bahia 
Blanca, South America, together with the remains of the 
mastodon, megalonyx, megatherium, toxodon, and other extinct 
animals, the teeth of an extinct horse family. This tooth, 
Prof. Owen found, in eompartng it with one found in North 
America by the eminent geologist Chas. Lyell, belonged to an 
extinct family of American horses, and gave to it the name of 
Equus Cursidene, from the peculiar shape of the teeth. We 
have in the science of patentology men who have acquired a 
national reputation, and have done their work most nobly in 
assisting to unravel the mysteries of nature. Foremost among 
them stands the name of Dr. Joseph Leidy, the eminent com- 
