[Illustration: ARMENIA, CAPPADOCIA, NORTHERN SYRIA ETC.
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.
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.