The Origin of the Horse

Abstract

THE receipt of a copy of Prof. J. C. Ewart's admirable paper on “The Multiple Origin of Horses and Ponies” suggests a few remarks. The paper in question is from the Transactions of the Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland, 1904—one could wish that it had appeared in a publication which comes more regularly under the notice of zoologists. In a previous paper (Proc. Roy. Soc. Edinburgh, 1903) Prof. Ewart had shown conclusively that Equus prjevalskii was not a hybrid between the kiang and the common horse, and had arrived at the conclusion that it might very well rank as a valid species. Lydekker in 1902 had proposed to regard E. prjevalskii (or przewalskii) as a subspecies of E. caballus, and now Prof. Ewart does the same, while recognising also two other subspecies, E. c. typicus and E. c. celticus. The animal named typicus is the Norse horse, which is arbitrarily selected as the type of the Linnean caballus. The Celtic pony, still surviving in the pure state in Iceland, is given the new name E. c. celticus. In its way, Prof. Ewart's demonstration of the distinctive characters of this animal deserves to rank with Darwin's treatise on the primrose, as an example of genius applied to common things. The case is so clear that the author himself is evidently half inclined to regard the Celtic pony as a valid species, and it seems to me that the facts justify us in recognising three species of living horses, E. prjevalskii (Poliakoff), E. celticus (Ewart) and E. caballus (L.). The indications are that these animals were quite distinct in the wild state, and the fact that various blends between caballus and celticus exist in domestication is no more proof of specific identity than the same sort of thing is among the dogs, which nobody doubts to have originated from more than one wild species.