Still we have not the least little bit of positive proof that such was the case, and although the site of many an ancient Indian village has been carefully explored, no bones of the horse have come to light, or if they have been found, bones of the ox or sheep were also present to tell that the village was occupied long after the advent of the whites. It is also a curious fact that within historic times there have been no wild horses, in the true sense of the word, unless indeed those found on the steppes north of the Sea of Azof be wild, and this is very doubtful. But long before the dawn of history the horse was domesticated in Europe, and Caesar found the Germans, and even the old Britons, using war chariots drawn by horses--for the first use man seems to have made of the horse was to aid him in killing off his fellow-man, and not until comparatively modern times was the animal employed in the peaceful arts of agriculture. The immediate predecessors of these horses were considerably smaller, being about the size and build of a pony, but they were very much like a horse in structure, save that the teeth were shorter. As they lived during Pliocene times, they have been named "Pliohippus." Going back into the past a step farther, though a pretty long step if we reckon by years, we come upon a number of animals very much like horses, save for certain cranial peculiarities and the fact that they had three toes on each foot, while the horse, as every one knows, has but one toe. Now, if we glance at the skeleton of a horse, we will see on either side of the canon-bone, in the same situation as the upper part of the little toes of the Hippotherium, as these three-toed horses are called, a long slender bone, termed by veterinarians the splint bone; and it requires no anatomical training to see that the bones in the two animals are the same. The horse lacks the lower part of his side toes, that is all, just as man will very probably some day lack the last bones of his little toe. We find an approach to this condition in some of the Hippotheres even, known as Protohippus, in which the side toes are quite small, foreshadowing the time when they shall have disappeared entirely. It may also be noted here that the splint bones of the horses of the bronze age are a little longer than those of existing horses, and that they are never united with the large central toe, while nowadays there is something of a tendency for the three bones to fuse into one, although part of this tendency the writer believes to be due to inflammation set up by the strain of the pulling and hauling the animal is now called upon to do. Some of these three-toed Hippotheres are not in the direct line of ancestry of the horse, but are side branches on the family tree, having become so highly specialized in certain directions that no further progress horseward was possible.