The romances of fifty years ago—Was the horse indigenous to this country?—The theories of the paleontologists not satisfactory—Pedigrees of over two millions of years too long—Outlines of horses on prehistoric ruins evidently modern—The linguistic test among the oldest tribes of Indians fails to discover any word for “Horse”—The horses abandoned west of the Mississippi by the followers of De Soto about 1541 were the progenitors of the wild horses of the plains. Fifty years ago there was much that was romantic and mysterious in our conceptions of the real character and origin of the vast herds of wild horses that abounded on our Western plains, and the same remark applies to their congeners on the pampas of South America. The wild horse and the Indian opened up a most inviting field for the writers of romance, and current literature was flooded with “Wild Western” stories, with the horse and the Indian as the leading characters. We are now one generation, at least, this side of the time when stories of this kind are either sought or read, but we are not past the period when the origin or introduction of the horse on this continent may be considered with interest and profit. Before touching upon the wild horse, as known in our early history, however, it may be well to consider, briefly, the question as to whether he may not have been indigenous to this continent. In our generation the spade has become a wonderful developer of the truths of ancient history. The buried and forgotten cities of the old world are being unearthed in Europe, Asia and Africa, and thousands of works of art and learning that had vanished from the face of the earth are again restored to the knowledge of the human race. In a kindred branch of investigation the geologists and paleontologists have been delving into the bowels of the earth—not to find what previous generations of men had left behind them, but to find what life was myriads of ages before man was placed on the earth. Out of the rocks they have, literally, quarried many strange examples of animal life that lave been buried millions of years, and hundreds of feet below the present surface. Among these strange petrefactions that were thus buried when the earth was young, there is one that has been widely exploited as the “Primal Horse,” that is, the animal from which our present horse was finally evolved. There are three or four specimens of this petrefaction now on exhibition in this country, the first having been discovered by Professor Marsh, of Yale College, and now in the museum of that institution. Nearly twenty years ago Professor Huxley, the great English naturalist, delivered a lecture in this city on the Marsh petrefaction as his text, in which he told us that the “Primal Horse” had, originally, five toes on each foot, that after an indeterminate geological period he lost the two outside toes on the hind feet, and after another million