Another argument in favor of the wild and unknown regions east and north of the Caspian as the habitat of the horse has been urged with much more power and effect. It has been accepted and reiterated by so many learned men, one after another, that I doubted the wisdom of attempting to overthrow it, until I found the spot in which it was fatally weak. This view of the question seems to rest upon the fact that the successive hosts of Barbarians that overran Europe in the early centuries of the Christian era brought their horses, as well as their flocks and herds, with them, and it is assumed that these horses were the first brought into Europe. This involves a total misconception of dates; not of a few years merely, but of many centuries. All of Europe, including Britain, and all of Northern Africa, were abundantly supplied with horses, probably a thousand years before the first destructive wave of Barbarians touched Europe. Linguistic and ethnological facts clearly prove that those people came from Asia, and possibly from a part of Asia where there were horses running wild, but that does not prove that they came from the original habitat of the horse. With no dates, either definite or approximate, to support this theory, and with no specific portion of the earth fixed upon as the general locality from which they came, it resolves itself into a mere speculation with nothing to support it, except the fact that different writers have been copying it from one another, without throwing any additional light upon it, for a number of generations.