Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, May 1885Various
History
Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, May 1885
Various
American literature -- Periodicals; Literature -- Periodicals
The horse family of the present day is divided, like most other
families, into two factions, which may be described for variety’s sake
as those of the true horses and the donkeys, these latter including
also the zebras, quaggas, and various other unfamiliar creatures whose
names, in very choice Latin, are only known to the more diligent
visitors at the Sunday Zoo. Now everybody must have noticed that the
chief broad distinction between these two great groups consists in the
feathering of the tail. The domestic donkey, with his near congeners,
the zebra and co., have smooth short-haired tails, ending in a single
bunch or fly-whisk of long hairs collected together in a tufted bundle
at the extreme tip. The horse, on the other hand, besides having horny
patches or callosities on both fore and hind legs, while the donkeys
have them on the fore legs only, has a hairy tail, in which the long
hairs are almost equally distributed from top to bottom, thus giving
it its peculiarly bushy and brushy appearance. But Prjevalsky’s horse,
as one would naturally expect from an early intermediate form, stands
halfway in this respect between the two groups, and acts the thankless
part of a family mediator; for it has most of its long tail-hairs
collected in a final flourish, like the donkey, but several of them
spring from the middle distance, as in the genuine Arab, though never
from the very top, thus showing an approach to the true horsey habit
without actually attaining that final pinnacle of equine glory. So
far as one can make out from the somewhat rude handicraft of my
prehistoric Phidias the horse of the quaternary epoch had much the
same caudal peculiarity; his tail was bushy, but only in the lower
half. He was still in the intermediate stage between horse and
donkey, a natural mule still struggling up aspiringly toward perfect
horsehood. In all other matters the two creatures—the cave man’s horse
and Prjevalsky’s—closely agree. Both display large heads, thick necks,
coarse manes, and a general disregard of “points” which would strike
disgust and dismay into the stout breasts of Messrs. Tattersall. In
fact over a T.Y.C. it may be confidently asserted, in the pure Saxon of
the sporting papers, that Prjevalsky’s and the cave man’s lot wouldn’t
be in it. Nevertheless a candid critic would be forced to admit that,
in spite of clumsiness, they both mean staying.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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