The daily morning journal and courier., 1903-03-03
THE THOROUGHBRED,
Its Origin Likely to be Found in Barb
 Blood or the Zebra.

DAOcu oL blC ACbi o
 In paper read by Professor Ridge
 way before the Cambridge (England)
 Philosophical society recently, the au- | thor said that not only, as had long
 been observed, did the Homeric Greeks l drive the horse before they rode him, | but that the same was true of all an- cient peoples-Egyptians Canaanites, | Assyrians, Aryans of Rig-Veda, Um-
 brians. Celts-and that the explanation of this was given hy Herodotus who, in
 speaking of the Sigynnae, the only tribe north of the. Danube whose name he knew, said that they had small horses, with large, fiat noses and very long | hair, which, though not able to carry a | man, were excellent under chariots; ' wherefore they used chariots," "Dion I Cassius,'' said Professor Ridgeway, i likewise says that the Britons used chariots in war;, because their horses were small though active.' The de- scription of the horses of the Sigynnae
 tallies exactly with the abundant re-
 mains of the primitive horse of Europe, l eaten in great quantities and delinea- ted on antlers by the men of the stone 1 age. He was small animal about ten hands high, with a big head. Even af- ter domestication he remained very small, as witness bits of bronze and i horn found in Swiss lake dwellings, the
 shoes found at Silchester, and in camps on the Roman Wall, etc. Authorities agree that from this primitive horse | has been developed the cart horses of the continent and these islands, while
 our blood horses have come from an eastern stock of slight build and smart 1 appearance. Our problem is to ascer-
 tain the original habitat of this superb
 or horse. He has not come from Upper Asia, as the Mongolian pony is taken as the type of the coarse, thickset horse from which sprang the cart horse. The Mongolian pony probably represents the Scythian horses, which continued to be of a small size down to Strabos time, and they were derived either from
 the tarpan or Prezevalsky's horse. The
 Mongoiian pony. though surefooted and
 enduring, is slow of pace. Neither Chi
 na, Siam nor Burmah have any irdi- denous horse answering tot blood
 horse. India could never breed horses,
 says Marco Polo, in whose time India
 was supplied either with Mongolian po- nies from Yunnan or with Arabs from south Persia, Alden and other Arabian
 ports. These Arabs fetched enormous
 prices, equivalent to two hundred
 pounds. It has hitherto been univer-
 sally held that Arabia is the original
 home of the blood horse. This is a
 baseless assumption. In the Old Testa-
 ment, the Arabs are never mentioned
 as riding anything but camels and ass-
 es. Though the author of Job knew oe
 the war horse, yet Job did not own a
 single horse, his equine possessions con-
 sisting of five hundred she asses. He
 rodotus (vii. SD enumerates the nations
 (including the Libyans) that supplied
 cavalry 10 XesXes' host, but the Arabs
 only furnish a camel corps. Agathar-
 chides (cted by Strabo) describes the
 Arabs as camel keepers.
 Finally. Strabo (fior A. D. D ex~
 pressly states that neither the people Of
 Arabia Felix nor those of Arabia Pe-
 traea bred horses. Naturally, then,
 Scaurus, after defeating the Arab king
 Aretas, put on his coins Aretas leading
 HIS tdIll9l. u IS cleal' lneIl, that QOWn to the Christian era the Arabs bred no
 horses. It is therefore clear that though the Persian kings in the fifth century E. c. bred the largest and best
 horses in Asia, these were not of all Arab strain. These horses were kept largely in Armenia, and are described by strabo as similar to the Parthian horses, and as differing from the horses bred in Greece and the other kinds of horses kiown in the Roman empire. There can be little doubt that they were the same horses as Marco Polo found in great numbers in Armenia Q270 A. D. known as Turkauns, the Turcoman