Horses

That was the closing phase of the long Age of Dragons. The principal beasts of the sea, the land and the air were reptiles who laid and hatched eggs instead of giving birth to living children. Few of them were so large as the elephants and whales of our own time, the greatest were already extinct, but still there were enough uncouth and monstrous {3} beasts to make life exciting for the creatures on which they fed.

Hidden away in the forest there were little animals, of reptile descent indeed, but quite free from family pride. These converted reptiles were filled with the first divine quality which ever appeared in the world, that mother-love which suckles the young at the breast. We will call them the Longtails.

We humans often feel that there is not enough food to go round. We find it hard to make both ends meet. We have to defend ourselves or run from our enemies. So it was with the Longtails, who were always hungry, hard up, and bound to fight or run. To put it roughly, some tribes of the Longtails took to hunting, and became the ancestors of all beasts of prey, some took to the trees as a refuge and feeding place, and so became the ancestors of apes and men. But our business is with those who took to a vegetarian diet and a habit of hiding or running. These stood on tip toe looking out for danger, or ran to escape being eaten. For such purposes the five-toed foot of the ancestral reptile, most useful on soft ground, became somewhat clumsy and awkward. For running they were better off {4} without a widely splayed foot, so with the passing of many generations their needless inner and outer toes shrank up the leg, became useless, and finally withered away, until no trace remained. Here came the parting of the vegetarian running animals into two big families. One family ran on the middle pair of toes, thus becoming the ancestors of the cloven-hoofed pig, deer, antelope, sheep, and ox. The other family ran upon the middle or third toe, and became the ancestors of the rhinoceros, the tapir, and the horse.

In the dense forests some of the vegetarian tribes of animals had on the face two little bags or glands, to hold a strong-smelling liquid. This perfume dropped on the herbage helped the members of the herd to scent one another's trails, and so keep together for company or defence. On the skulls of some kinds of horses there may still be seen the hollow where the sac used to be.

The bald skin of the pig is boldly painted in splashes of pink and brown to imitate the lights and shadows of forest undergrowth. The forest ancestors of the horse were bald, and painted just the same way; and their forest colouring may still be seen under the {5} hairy coat, especially at the muzzle, where the hair is thin.

Of direct ancestors to the horse the earliest known was a little fellow called Hyracotherium, coloured no doubt like the pig or the hairless Mexican dog, and not bigger than a toy terrier. His range extended from England to New Mexico, across the old Atlantic continent. In him the original five toes had been reduced to four on the front foot, and three on the hind, as with the tapir, who is the very portrait of a horse-ancestor, although of larger growth.

The tapir was ever a staunch conservative preferring death to reform. So he remains, one of the most ancient of all living animals, and relic of the long forgotten ages when the world was one big forest. Nowadays the tapir range which covered all the northern continents has shrunken to three districts widely sundered: Brazil, Mexico, and the Malay Peninsula. In all three he is dying out, and in a few more years will be extinct.

From the tapir's habits we may reason that the horse ancestors were creatures not only of the deep glades of the forest, but also of closely wooded mountain ranges. They were shy and harmless, feeding at night on buds, leaves and the tender shoots of bushes, not on grass. {6} To this diet the horse reverts quite readily in times of famine, and in spring before the new grass sprouts, while the stable vice called cribbing develops when there is not enough bulk in his forage. The ancestors were fond of bathing, and when hunted would take refuge in the water. It will be noted that although wild horses do not bathe, the tame stock are excellent at swimming. The dappled skin of the tapir had grown a coat of hair, dark brown in the Americas, their original home. The long tail had shrunk, and in the tapir is reduced to a mere bud.

But the main interest is in the tapir's snout, which, like the elephant's trunk, has wonderful powers of holding and tearing down branches, of feeling, sensing, and handling. The horse-ancestor had a tapir snout of which the horse's upper lip is the survival. Play with any horse and you will notice how the lips try to curl round and grip one's fingers, to bring them within reach of the teeth. They will curl round, grip, and tear the bunch grass or pampas grass of the wild ranges. They are softer than velvet, delicate as a baby's hand, sensitive as the fingers of an artist, will caress like a woman's lips. The short hairs have an exquisite sense of touch, the beard bristles {7} are used to sense grass with in the dark, and the whole instrument is wondrously designed to select sweet grasses, rejecting poisonous or unwholesome plants, so that feeding goes on through hours of total darkness.

{Sidenote: The earlier world]

Had the Earth remained an unbroken forest under a roof of cloud there had been no change since the Age of Dragons, no mighty drama of Creation lifting man and horse out of the shadows to work together as master and servant in the conquest and taming of the wilderness and final subjugation of the World.

The one great factor in Earth's history is the lessening of the sun's heat. Through long revolving ages the heat which the Earth received from the sun diminished. Ever less vapour was lifted from the Equatorial seas, the world-roof of cloud thinned out and disappeared; direct sunshine poured down instead of the endless rains; there was no moisture left to nourish the worldwide forest. Little by little glades opened in the woodlands caused by drought, savannahs replaced the timber, of tall jungle grasses, the openings widened into prairies, and vast grassy steppes, thousands of miles in breadth, evolved at their centres an aching core of desert. So we have reached the phase when forest, prairie {8} and desert each claim one-third of the land surface. We are passing on to the phase, which Mars has reached, of world-wide desert, and beyond that is the far future when, like the Moon, our Earth will swing dead through the great deeps of space.

As the slow tremendous change of the Earth's climate narrowed the forest, there was no longer food for all the woodland animals, and some of them ventured out into the open glades. Here was a final parting of the ways between the tapir who stayed in the woods and the horse-ancestor who went out into the open. He was as yet no bigger than a sheep, and still wore three toes on each foot, but the grass diet agreed with him, for his tribe soon grew to the size of an English donkey. The firmer ground no longer needed a wide tread to the foot. Slowly the second and fourth toes shrank away up the leg, and hung there like the dew claw of a dog, sometimes surviving more or less even in human times, as with Julius Cæsar's charger. The next ages evolved an animal the size of our ponies, running on one toe hardened to the hoof we know to-day. The snout diminished, while the tail became a fly whisk.

So we have the beginning of a group of {9} animals the tarpan (Prejevalski) zebra, quagga and ass. They are so much alike that one cannot easily tell from the bones to which kind a skeleton belongs. We must think of them, then, as varieties of the horse.

PROPOSITIONS. In the study of any subject, if we can only begin by clearing our vision, we shall have a sporting chance of avoiding muddle.

The horse, like man or any other animal, reflects his environment in times past and present.

1. If all countries had equal lighting, all horses would reflect one colour.

2. If all countries were equally warm, all horses would grow the same thickness of coat.

3. If all countries had equal moisture, all horses would show similar endurance.

4. If all countries had one type of landscape, all horses would show the same markings.

5. If all countries had one soil, all horses would be of one build.

6. If all countries had one weight of forage to the acre, all horses would have one bulk.

8. It follows that the study of light, heat, moisture, landscape, soil, and food should explain the origin of the wild types of horses. Our breeds are got by crossing from these varieties.

If, therefore, the facts which we find out by study shall correspond with the reader's own experience of horses, no further proof is needed; but if they fail to appeal to the reader's sense and judgment, no balancing of proofs upon a point of falsehood will save a useless book from the flames which await waste paper.

PART I. COLORATION BY SUNLIGHT.

The best way to train one's sense of colour is to dabble in landscape painting. At first, one feels that there must be a personal Devil, but with luck the colours begin to clear, showing that the tones of night and the deep sea are based on indigo, while those of the day are blue, red and yellow variously mixed. The blend of blue and red is violet; the mixture of blue and yellow gives us green; and if we want an orange we use red and yellow. The blending of all seven is sunlight in theory, but makes mud in practice.