Byways in British Archaeology

It is probable that the story of the horse fascinates more diverse groups of students than does that of any other domestic animal. Truly, too, has it been said, though with a touch of cynicism, that association with this creature will draw out all that is knavish in man, just as it will encourage acts of the finest heroism. But whether the cynic or the idealist be right, or each partly right, there can be no denial of the leading place taken by the horse in the history of man’s conquest of Nature or in the decisive battles which have determined the supremacy of nations.

To the expert palaeontologist, who prepares the way for the patient workers in zoology and folk-lore, the descent of the horse is attractive because it illustrates, with great beauty and precision, the modern doctrine of development. From an examination of many collections of bones, derived both from the Old and the New Worlds, Huxley and Marsh constructed a general pedigree, of which the details, as discoveries have gradually accumulated, have been filled in by such workers as Sir E. Ray Lankester, Dr C. W. Andrews, Mr R. Lydekker, and Professor J. Cossar Ewart, in Britain, and, in the United States, by Professor R. S. Lull. We begin, far back in the lowest Eocene division of the Tertiary period, with a small hypothetical, or at least unidentified, plantigrade creature, perhaps no larger than a rabbit, with five digits on each of its fore and hind limbs. It would be difficult to produce a specimen of the exact ancestral animal which would satisfy all investigators, but its former existence is doubted by few[1085]. Still keeping to the Eocene formation, though mounting to a higher horizon—the London Clay—we come to Hyracotherium, which was an animal about the size of a hare or very small fox, and which fed on the soft, green vegetation around the margins of lakes and rivers[1086]. Hyracotherium (Fig. 80) had four toes on its fore feet[1087], with vestiges, or “rudiments,” as they are unfortunately called, of a fifth.

In Palaeotherium of the Upper Eocene, there are three toes only, but these are nearly equal in size[1088]. (It may be well to recall the geological systems of the Tertiary period: they are, in ascending order, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene.) In the Oligocene genus Mesohippus, of which the members were perhaps as large as a sheep, there is still a suggestion of a fourth toe in the fore foot[1089], but the two side toes which are actually discernible do not themselves quite touch the ground. In Hipparion of the Miocene and Pliocene formations, the lateral toes, each terminated by hoofs, were still shorter; and the earlier Anchitherium was in much the same plight. Both the last-named animals are now deemed to be off the direct ancestral line of our present-day horses[1090], but they may stand as early types. Indeed it is difficult to formulate a genealogy which is everywhere accepted. Chiefly owing to the migrations which must have occurred, no complete family tree can be prepared, and all attempts, while true as a whole, are only approximately correct as regards the detailed relationships. The general direction being clear, onward we go, passing creatures as large as a donkey, still preserving vestiges of the lateral toes, till at last we reach the horses of history. The horse which we know