o ponder over the early history of all these tribes.

Where have they all come from? Where shall we look for the first
ancestors of these wild and graceful animals? For the answer to this
question I had to travel back to America, to those Western United
States where Professor Marsh has made such grand discoveries in horse
history. For there, in the very country where horses were supposed
never to have been before the Spaniards brought them a few centuries
ago, we have now found the true birthplace of the equine race.

Come back with me to a time so remote that we cannot measure it even
by hundred of thousands of years, and let us visit the territories of
Utah and Wyoming. Those highlands were very different then from what
they are now. Just risen out of the seas of the Cretaceous Period,
they were then clothed with dense forests of palms, tree-ferns, and
screw-pines, magnolias and laurels, interspersed with wide-spreading
lakes, on the margins of which strange and curious animals fed and
flourished. There were large beasts with teeth like the tapir and the
bear, and feet like the elephant; and others far more dangerous, half
bear, half hyaena, prowling around to attack the clumsy paleotherium or
the anoplotherium, something between a rhinoceros and a horse, which
grazed by the waterside, while graceful antelopes fed on the rich
grass. And among these were some little animals no bigger than foxes,
with four toes and a splint for the fifth, on their front feet, and
three toes on the hind ones.

These clumsy little animals, whose bones have been found in the rocks
of Utah and Wyoming, have been called _Eohippus_, or horses of the
dawn, by naturalists. They were animals with real toes, yet their
bones and teeth show that they belonged to the horse tribe, and
already the fifth toe common to most other toed animals was beginning
to disappear.

This was in the Eocene Period, and before it passed away with its
screw-pines and tree-ferns, another rather larger animal, called the
Orohippus, had taken the place of the small one, and he had only four
toes on his front feet. The splint had disappeared, and as time went
on still other animals followed, always with fewer toes, while they
gained slender fleet legs, together with an increase in size and in
gracefulness. First one as large as a sheep (Mesohippus) had only
three toes and a splint. Then the splint again disappeared, and one
large and two dwindling toes only remained, t