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CHAPTER XVII
THE HORSE FAMILY
THERE have been few more important developments in
the progress of man than the domestication of the horse
sometime before the dawn of history. By subduing the
horse to his will man obtained an instrument for con-
quering distance which he was unable to improve upon
for thousands of years. Until early in the nineteenth
century a human being never had traveled faster on land
than a horse could run. Its value was discovered all over
again during the Boer War, and Kipling pointed out to
the British army that four legs are better than two.
We do not know definitely what species was domesti-
cated. Of the wild relatives of the horse still extant-
Prejvalski's horse, the wild asses, and the zebra-none
fills exactly the qualifications which the ancestor of the
domestic type must have possessed and neither does the
extinct forest horse of Europe.
The specifications for an ancestor of the domestic horse
are most closely approximated by Prejvalski's horse in
Central Asia. This was discovered in i 88o by the Russian
army officer and explorer from whom it takes its name,
and the zoologists are more or less agreed that it is at
least a close relative of the domestic horse. Prejvalski
brought back only one skin of the wild horse, from which
the species was described, but a few years later two other
Russian travelers, the brothers Grum-Grizimailo, brought
back four of these animals alive, depositing them in the
zoological gardens at St. Petersburg.
In i889 Frederick Edward Falz-Fein, a wealthy German
who had established a wild animal preserve of nearly
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