Indeed, the whole history of the evolution of the horse by natural selection is a complete illustration of adaptation to environment. Even to-day in the Falkland Islands, where the whole surface is soft, mossy bogland, the horses’ feet grow to over twelve inches in length, and curl up so that frequently they can hardly walk upon them. Where we use horses on hard, artificial roads it is necessary to have this toe-nail or hoof pared, and protected by shoes. Where the horse was first domesticated is a matter of dispute upon which historians are not at all agreed. Some say it was in Egypt, some select Armenia, and some content themselves with the general statement that horses were indigenous in Western and Central Asia. It would be interesting to go into this discussion were it not that it would delay us too long from the subject in hand. At first they were used only in war and for sport, the camel being used for journeys and transportation, and the ox for agriculture. Indeed, I fancy the horse was never used to the plough until in the tenth century in Europe. The sculptures of ancient Greece and contemporaneous civilizations give us the best idea obtainable of what manner of animal the horse was in the periods when those sculptures were made. Mr. Edward L. Anderson, one of the most careful students of the horse and his history, says: “Whether Western Asia is or is not the home of the horse, he was doubtless domesticated there in very early times, and it was from Syria that the Egyptians received their horses through their Bedouin conquerors. The horses of the Babylonians probably came from Persia, and the original source of all these may have been Central Asia, from which last-named region the animal also passed into Europe, if the horse were not indigenous to some of the countries in which history finds it. We learn that Sargon I. (3800 B.C.) rode in his chariot more than two thousand years before there is an exhibition of the horse in the Egyptian sculptures or proof of its existence in Syria, and his kingdom of Akkad bordered upon Persia, giving a strong presumption that the desert horse came from the last-named region through Babylonian hands. It seems after an examination of the representations on the monuments, that the Eastern horse has changed but little during thousands of years. Taking a copy of one of the sculptures of the palace of Ashur-bani-pal, supposed to have been executed about the middle of the seventh century before our era, and assuming that the bareheaded men were 5 feet 8 inches in height, I found that the horses would stand about 14½ hands—very near the normal size of the desert horse of our day. The horses of ancient Greece must have been starvelings from some Northern clime, for the animals on the Parthenon frieze are but a trifle over 12 hands in height, and are the prototypes of the Norwegian Fiord pony—a fixed type of a very valuable small horse.”