Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. ORIGINAL HABITAT OF THE HORSE. No indications that the horse was originally wild—The steppes of High Asia and Arabia not tenable as his original home—Color not sufficient evidence— Impossibility of horses existing in Arabia in a wild state—No horses in Arabia until 356 A.d.—Large forces of Armenian, Median, and Cappaciocian cavalry employed more than one thousand seven hundred years B.c. — A breed of white race horses—Special adaptability of the Armenian country to the horse—Armenia a horse-exporting country before the Prophet Ezekiel—Devotion of the Armenian people to agricultural and pastoral pursuits through a period of four thousand years—All the evidences point to ancient Armenia as the center from which the horse was distributed. In undertaking to consider and determine what particular portion of the earth was the original habitat of the horse, we must not forget that we are in a field that antedates all historv, both sacred and profane. When we have gone buck to the very first dawnings of historical records we are still far short of the period in which initial light can be reached. In profane history, with more or less safety, we can get back to a point about seventeen hundred years before the Christian era; and in sacred history about two hundred years less. At both of these dates the horses referred to were not in a feral state, but were the companions and servants of man. There have been two separate theories advanced which demand some attention, because of the eminence and learning of the men who have advanced them. The first is that the original habitat of the horse was on the steppes of High Asia, east and north of the Caspian and the Black Sea. The only argument I have ever seen advanced in support of this theory is based upon the great number...