It was that of a sturdy brute, thirteen or fourteen hands high, not ill represented, on a reduced scale, by the Shetland ponies of our own time, but untamed, and, it might have been thought, untameable. The race had not then found its true vocation. Man was enabled, by his superior intelligence, to make it his prey, but had not yet reached the higher point of enlisting its matchless qualities in his service. Horses were, accordingly, neither ridden nor driven, but hunted and eaten. Piles of bones still attest the hippophagous habits of the ‘stone-men.’ At Solutré, near Mâcon, a veritable equine Golgotha has been excavated; similar accumulations were found in the recesses of Monte Pellegrino in Sicily; and Sir Richard Owen made the curious remark that, evidently through gastronomic selection, the osseous remains of colts and fillies vastly predominated, in the débris from the cave of Bruniquel, over those of full-grown horses.[87] Footnote 87: _Phil. Trans._ 1869, p. 535. The descent of our existing horses from the cave-animals is doubtful, Eastern importations having at any rate greatly improved and modified the breed. Wild horses, indeed, still at the end of the sixteenth century roamed the slopes of the Vosges, and were hunted as game in Poland and Lithuania;[88] but they may have been _muzins_, or runaways, like the mustangs on the American prairies. Nowadays, certainly, the animal is found in a state of aboriginal freedom nowhere save on the steppes of Central Asia, in the primitive home of the race. There, in all likelihood, the noblest of brute-forms was brought to perfection; there it was dominated by man; and thence equestrian arts, with their manifold results for civilisation, were propagated among the nations of the world. They were taught to the Egyptians, it would seem, by their shepherd conquerors, but were not learned by the Arabs until a couple of millenniums later, the Arab contingent in Xerxes’ army having been a ‘camel-corps.’ The Persians, indeed, early picked up the habit of riding from the example of their Tartar neighbours; yet that it was no original Aryan accomplishment, the absence of a common Aryan word to express the idea sufficiently shows. The relations of our primitive ancestors with the animal had, at the most, reached what might be called the second, or Scythian stage, when droves of half-wild horses took the place of cattle, and mares’ milk was an important article of food. The aboriginal cavalry of the desert belonged, on the other hand, to the wide kinship of Attila’s Huns, who, separated from their steeds, were as helpless as swans on shore. The war-chariot, however, was an Assyrian invention, dating back at least to the seventeenth century B.C. It quickly reached Egypt on one side, India on the other, and was adopted, some time before the Dorian invasion, by the Achæans of the Peloponnesus. Mycenæan grave-stones of about the twelfth century are engraven with battle and