The most remarkable and at the same time the most untenable of all the claims that have been urged about the horse is that he was indigenous in Arabia. We can tolerate any number of foolish claims set up to show that the Arabian horse is superior to all others, for such assertions can be tested and disproved, as they have been a thousand times, but the claim that Arabia was the original habitat of the horse is so utterly preposterous, and yet so widely advocated by writers and others who know nothing about it, that we must consider it with some brief deliberation. When the maimed and crippled horses of De Soto were turned loose and abandoned on the plains of Texas, they had all around them the means of an abundant and healthy subsistence, and they multiplied and grew into an innumerable host that made the earth tremble when they moved in great masses. Under the same favorable conditions of water and pasture, the same results followed on the pampas of South America. Upon the early settlement of Virginia, as well probably as in some of the other colonies, and within two hundred years, many of the horses of the colonists strayed away, became wild and remained so, propagating and increasing for generations, and until the growing numbers of their former masters captured or exterminated them. The varied herbage of the forest and its grassy swales, and streams of pure water everywhere, made Virginia a paradise for the horse in his feral state. Buffon, the French naturalist of a hundred and fifty years ago, notices the theory of the wild horses of Arabia, but he is careful not to commit himself nor indorse it in any form. In Vol. I., p. 237, he says: “According to Mannol, the Arabian horses are descended from the wild horses in the deserts of Arabia, of which, in ancient times, large studs were formed,” etc. In going further, to find where Mannol got his information, it appears that somebody, with an unpronounceable name that I have forgotten, told him so. Major Upton, a very intelligent but very credulous modern writer on what he saw and learned in the desert, says he never heard of this story of wild horses in Arabia, and pronounces it a “fallacy.” When we consider that Arabia never was conquered and the reason why, although Rome, at the very culmination of her power, followed by Assyria and Egypt, all failed of their purpose without meeting an enemy in battle, we must accept the fact that nature had interposed a barrier that military power could not surmount. The barrenness and aridity of the desert has always protected the Arabs against the most powerful armies of the mightiest nations. Now, to maintain that wild horses could not only live, but flourish and increase, in a country where there was not enough edible herbage on a thousand acres to keep a grasshopper alive, and not a running stream of water within five hundred miles, requires a measure of mental sterility that can be found nowhere but among a few of the writers on the Arabian horse.