ch our old master has so cleverly delineated
for us on his scrap of horn similarly retained many traces of the
earlier united horse-and-donkey ancestor. Professor Huxley has admirably
reconstructed for us the pedigree of the horse, beginning with a little
creature from the Eocene beds of New Mexico, with five toes to each hind
foot, and ending with the modern horse, whose hoof is now practically
reduced to a single and solid-nailed toe. Intermediate stages show us an
Upper Eocene animal as big as a fox, with four toes on his front feet
and three behind; a Miocene kind as big as a sheep, with only three toes
on the front foot, the two outer of which are smaller than the big
middle one; and finally a Pliocene form, as big as a donkey, with one
stout middle toe, the real hoof, flanked by two smaller ones, too short
by far to reach the ground. In our own horse these lateral toes have
become reduced to what are known by veterinaries as splint bones,
combined with the canon in a single solidly morticed piece. But in the
pre-Glacial horses the splint bones still generally remained quite
distinct, thus pointing back to the still earlier period when they
existed as two separate and independent side toes in the ancestral
quadruped. In a few cave specimens, however, the splints are found
united with the canons in a single piece, while conversely horses are
sometimes, though very rarely, born at the present day with three-toed
feet, exactly resembling those of their half-forgotten ancestor, the
Pliocene hipparion.

The reason why we know so much about the horses of the cave period is, I
am bound to admit, simply and solely because the man of the period ate
them. Hippophagy has always been popular in France; it was practised by
pre-Glacial man in the caves of Perigord, and revived with immense
enthusiasm by the gourmets of the Boulevards after the siege of Paris
and the hunger of the Commune. The cave men hunted and killed the wild
horse of their own times, and one of the best of their remaining works
of art represents a naked hunter attacking two horses, while a huge
snake winds itself unperceived behind close to his heel. In this rough
prehistoric sketch one seems to catch some faint antique foreshadowing
of the rude humour of the 'Petit Journal pour Rire.' Some archaeologists
even believe that the horse was domesticated by the cave men as a source
of food, and argue that the familiarity with its form shown in the
drawings could o