THE HORSE. 
CLASSES OF BRITISH HORSES. 
When Julius Caesar landed amongst the Belgse on the shores of Kent, about fifty-four years before our common era, he found 
the natives possessed of Horses, which they used for cavalry, or attached to chariots of war after the manner of the Assyrians, the 
Persians, and other people of the East in the first ages, of the Egyptians in the remotest times, and of the Greeks in the era 
termed Heroic. The early use of the Horse, in a manner thus artificial, by nations so remote from one another as the inhabitants 
of Celtic Britain and the first civilized communities of the East, may be regarded as one of the many proofs derived from history, 
sacred and profane, from language, and from similarity of customs, religious and social, of the pristine relation between the early 
settlers of Europe and the people nearer to the great centre of the human family in Asia. The most simple and natural manner 
of reducing the Horse to subjection is by making him bear the burden of his rider; and it may be assumed that this was the method 
of domestication which preceded that of attaching him to an armed equipage, the construction of which infers a certain advance¬ 
ment in the useful arts. It can scarcely be believed that the scattered tribes which peopled Europe during the first periods of 
colonization had themselves devised a method of using the Horse so little suited to their wants, and to the countries of marsh, 
forest, and mountain, over which they were spread. It is more consonant with reasonable probability to suppose, that the first 
settlers of Europe brought with them the practice from the countries from which they were themselves derived. 
With respect to the origin of the early inhabitants of Western Europe, the most reasonable supposition is, that they were an 
offset from a great family of mankind established in Asia, and that they had spread themselves in the manner of colonists westward ; 
but that, at other unknown and posterior epochs, when population had extended northward into the regions beyond the Caucasus, 
known generally and vaguely to the ancients as Scythia and Sarmatia, other settlers migrated westward, giving origin to the Scan¬ 
dinavian, the modern German, and other nations, commonly, but incorrectly, comprehended under the general term Teutonic or 
Gothic. These migrations, like wave succeeding wave, followed one after another slowly westward; and the latter settlers, pressing 
upon the former, either dispossessed them, or became mingled with them. But whatever be the particular history of these pristine 
movements of the first families of mankind, two races of men at least were found in the course of ages inhabiting Western Europe, 
distinguished from one another by physiological characters, by speech, by social habits, and religious observances; the first com¬ 
monly termed Celtse, the latter usually designated Teutones or Gothi; the one apparently derived from the countries south of 
the line of the Caucasus, the other from the ruder regions extending northward. The Celtse, known to ancient writers as Cynetse, 
Cymri, Iberi, &c., were usually found in patriarchal communities of tribes or clans, generally disunited and at war with one 
another, or only combined for the purpose of aggression or mutual defence. The people were submissive to authority, and had 
an order of priests of great influence and power, who often taught the immortality and transmigration of the soul, worshipped 
in groves, erected altars and sacred enclosures of unhewn stone, of which innumerable remains are yet spread over Europe, paid, 
like the Persian Magi, a reverence to fire, to the heavenly bodies, and to certain plants, and adopted the horrid rite of human 
sacrifices as practised by the Phoenicians and other Syrians. On the other hand, the ultra-Caucasian, Scythian or Gothic, colonists 
formed larger communities, under a system rather feudal than patriarchal. The people, although influenced by a wild superstition, 
were tenacious of individual rights, like the free Scythians in every age. They had horses whose flesh they sometimes used as 
food, and which they offered up in sacrifices to their divinities, but which, so far as is known, they never attached to chariots of 
war like the true Celtse. 
The Celtse, continually pressed upon and driven westward, were found, at the period of the Homan conquests, in Spain, Gaul, 
part of Germany, and the Islands of Britain; and the latter appear to have been in their exclusive possession at the time of the 
Roman invasion. Some indeed have supposed, that even at this last period a nation of Gothic origin had found its way to Britain, 
and occupied, under the name of Belgse, the part of the country where Caesar landed. But the Belgse were themselves a Celtic people, 
as the testimony of Strabo proves; and the description which Caesar himself gives of them, shows that they were a race differing 
in no essential respects from the other Britons. It was not for many ages afterwards, during the decline of the Roman empire, 
that the really Gothic nations found their way in numbers into Britain, and, reducing the greater part of it to subjection, imposed 
upon it their customs, laws, and language. At the time of our Saviour, and long afterwards, the inhabitants of these Islands were 
essentially Celtic ; and that the same race had inhabited the country from the earliest times, appears from innumerable remains of 
ancient forts, sepulchral tumuli and cairns, rude altars, and circles of stones and other monuments, which can be referred to no 
other race but the Celtic; and from the names of mountains, rivers, promontories, and other natural objects, which to this hour 
retain the designations imposed upon them by the Celtic aborigines. 
(H) 
