The evolution of the horse / by William D. Matthew.

  • William Diller Matthew
Date:
[1903]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The evolution of the horse / by William D. Matthew. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    part. The Wild Horse of prehistoric Europe, a small race, short-legged and shaggy-haired, was domesticated by man, a fact that is known from the rude drawings scratched on bone or ivory by men of the Neolithic or Polished Stone Age. But the Domes- tic Horse now in use is derived chiefly from the Asiatic race, al- though it is probable that in some breeds there is a considerable strain of this shaggy, short-legged European race, and it is pos- sible also that African races may have been domesticated and to some extent mixed with the Asiatic species. The domesticated Ass is a descendant of the African species. The Evolution of the Horse. The history of the evolution of the Horse through the Ter- tiary period or Age of Mammals affords the best known illustra- tion in existence of the doctrine of evolution by means of natural selection and the adaptation of a race of animals to its environ- ment. The ancestry of this family has been traced back to nearly the beginning of the Tertiary without a single important break. During this long period of time, estimated at nearly three millions of years, these animals passed through important changes in all parts of the body, but especially in the teeth and feet, adapting them more and more perfectly to their particular environment, namely the open plains of a great plateau region with their scanty stunted herbage, which is the natural habitat of the Horse. In the series of ancestors of the Horse we can trace every step in the evolution of those marked peculiarities of teeth and feet which distinguish the modern Horse from an ancestor which so little suggests a horse that, when its remains were first found forty years ago, the animal was named by the great palaeontologist Richard Owen, the Hyracotherium or “Coney-like Beast.” Its relation to the Horse was not at that time suspected by Professor Owen, and was recognized by scientific men only when several of the intermediate stages between it and its modern descendant had been discovered. On the other hand this first ancestor of the Horse line is very difficult to distinguish from the contemporary ancestors of tapirs and rhinoceroses, and indicates how all the