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. Of all the curiosities in which the literature of the Arabian horse abounds and in the multitudinous efforts to give him the primacy among horses, there seems to be nothing quite so absurd as this story about his being indigenous to the desert. Animals in a wild state are never found except in countries and districts where the conditions surrounding provide them with food and water. How long would a band of strong, healthy horses live if turned loose to seek their own subsistence in the desert of Arabia? Of all the countries on the face of the globe there is no one where the horse is so completely dependent upon, the care and support of his master as Arabia.