The very first links in this chain are the remains of the bronze age and those found among the ruins of the ancient Swiss lake dwellings; but earlier still than these are the bones of horses found abundantly in northern Europe, Asia, and America. The individual bones and teeth of some of these horses are scarcely distinguishable from those of to-day, a fact noted in the name, _Equus fraternus_, applied to one species; and when teeth alone are found, it is at times practically impossible to say whether they belong to a fossil horse or to a modern animal. But when enough scattered bones are gathered to make a fairly complete skeleton, it becomes evident that the fossil horse had a proportionately larger head and smaller feet than his existing relative, and that he was a little more like an ass or zebra, for the latter, spite of his gay coat, is a near relative of the lowly ass. Moreover, primitive man made sketches of the primitive horse, just as he did of the mammoth, and these indicate that the horse of those days was something like an overgrown Shetland pony, low and heavily built, large-headed and rough-coated. For the old cave-dwellers of Europe were intimately acquainted with the prehistoric horses, using them for food, as they did almost every animal that fell beneath their flint arrows and stone axes. And if one may judge from the abundance of bones, the horses must have roamed about in bands, just as the horses escaped from civilization roam, or have roamed, over the pampas of South America and the prairies of the West. The horse was just as abundant in North America in Pleistocene time as in Europe; but there is no evidence to show that it was contemporary with early man in North America, and, even were this the case, it is generally believed that long before the discovery of America the horse had disappeared. And yet, so plentiful and so fresh are his remains, and so much like those of the mustang, that the late Professor Cope was wont to say that it almost seemed as if the horse _might_ have lingered in Texas until the coming of the white man. And Sir William Flower wrote: "There is a possibility of the animal having still existed, in a wild state, in some parts of the continent remote from that which was first visited by the Spaniards, where they were certainly unknown. It has been suggested that the horses which were found by Cabot in La Plata in 1530 cannot have been introduced."