LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
THE DOMESTICATION OF THE HORSE.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE SPEOTATOR.1 SIR, —Your correspondent the author of the " Book of the Horse " has written a letter in your issue of last week so entirely in agreement with my own views, that I have ordered his book, and shall proceed to read it with all speed. It is always pleasant to read what you agree with, and judging of the " Book of the Horse " by the letter of its author, as the wise man of old judged of a house from what he saw of a brick, I anticipate much pleasure from the perusal of it. Your correspondent's words, how- ever, may have led some of your readers to suppose that the parts of the world which I inhabit, or have visited, are all so ad- vanced in the knowledge and practice of agricultural economics as to have discarded the ox for the horse, not only for the purposes of a beast of burden and for those of draught, but also for those of ploughing. I should be sorry that either your readers or your correspondent should have reason to think me either blind or untravelled, and I conse- quently write to you as follows : And I have to say that a man who will travel beyond the ring-fence of a model farm in these South-Midland Counties, and will occasionally open his eyes whilst thus journeying, cannot fail to see that the ox is still used for ploughing, without going to " France," or to " Southern Germany," or to " all Hungary," or to " all Italy," or to " all India," or indeed to any other country than this, whether specified or not by your correspondent. There is, I am informed by a gentleman of my acquaintance, some difficulty in getting even Berkshire boys to " go with the bulls "—that is, to undertake a team of oxen, even for ploughing—so slow are their movements, and so " slow " is the work considered. Still, there is many a parish within easy reach of this place where the ox may still be seen ploughing as in the time of the ancients, and a farmer who can overcome the innovating spirit of false pride in his labourers which I have just alluded to, and which your correspondent, I am sure, disapproves of as much as I do, who has a large number of oxen, and who has only a small number of those dearer animals, horses, is not guilty, even in days of steam-ploughs, of any great agricultural solecism in ploughing with oxen. But in a country where metalled roads exist, it would be an insolent waste of wages and of time, and so an offence against the self- respect of mankind, to employ on them for purposes of draught the victinza tarda of Ovid, the tarda volventia plaustra of Virgil. I am not easily surprised at exhibitions of backwardness, but if I were to meet a yoke of oxen plodding along a turnpike road in the most Conservative county even in England (I exclude Wales and Scotland), with a cart at their tails, I should lift my hands in amazement, and exclaim, " Bos locutus !" or (as we are living under the Ballot), "suffragatus est !" Draught, however, and ploughing are two different things, and the functions of a " beast of burden " are yet a third, to which, as you rightly suggest, the lop-sided services of the camel are all but exclusively confined.
If you will allow me, whilst waiting to read " The Book of the Horse," I will say a word or two as to the source to which we probably owe the acquisition of that animal. I have no Turkish proclivities, and I do not think that, after all, impaling is prefer- able as a mode of capital punishment to intraparietal hanging, even for persons who have denied that their friends the Turks ever practised it. Still, I would give even the Turk, and any worser being, if any such (the Rev. John R. Beard, or rather his book, notwithstanding) exist, his due. And it is to a race of the same stock at least as the Turks that we owe the horse This conclusion is stated in plain terms by Victor Hehn, in the dis-
quisition on the horse which he has added to the later editions of his " Kulturpflanzen und Hausthiere," Ed. iii., 1877, pp. 55-6, a work worthy to stand, though but in octavo, side by side with the ponderous folios of Bocbart and the ingens volumes of Bustamantinus (for which see Bochart, lii., 815). To this con- clusion Hehn adds the following words :—"The Steppe is the place of origin of the horse ; the olive-coloured inhabitants of the Steppes tamed it, and after accomplishing this, made their whole existence dependent upon it. After that, all their creative ability was exhausted, and when they came Westward on horse- back, they possessed only the power of destroying." The evid- ence which Hehn gives for his conclusion is mainly literary and historical. I will put before your readers two arguments based upon the history of the names which the animal has borne in two very different parts of the world,—Assyria, to wit, and Finland. Writing here in Oxford,with gravels—to say nothing of " British pit-dwellings "—which contain human implements as well as horse-bones, under our floors, I do not, of course, forget that the Cave man subordinated the horse to the purposes of his hard life, and ate him, as later savages have done and do ; but, as our miraculous Premier has said, "a good deal has happened since then," in the way of redistribution of men, citizens, horses, and empires. And the words I shall adduce are the words which were applied to the horse as reimported in domesticity into, not as primarily subdued in, the Western half of the Old World.
The first of these arguments for the importation of the modern domestic horse as a domesticated animal (1 know of no verbal nor other trustworthy history of the wild parent stock, which the " Tarpan " is supposed to be) from Eastern Asia, is given us in the following sentences from M. Francois Lenormant's " Premieres Civilisations, Vol. I., p. 322 :—" Dans la langue acca- dienne, c'est a dire, dans l'idiome touranien, qui a precede en Chaldee l'idiome semitique qualifie d'assyrien, et qui a ad celui des inventeurs de recriture cuneiforme, le cheval s'appelle pas Kurra, 41a bete de somme de l'Orient.' II n'a pas d'autre nom. Par consequent, pour les plus anciens habitants du bassin de l'Euphrate et du Tigre, le cheval etait un animal d'origine etrangere, amene de l'Est."
Secondly, of the Finns, it has been repeatedly said ("Dietrich bei Hofer, Zeitschrift fiir die 1Vissenschaft der Sprache,"
39 ff., cit. Weinhold, Altnordisches Leben," 1855; cit. in turn by Middendorff, in his charming "Sibirische Reise," 1874, p. 1341), that their language shows that they got all their domestic animals from the Germans, except the reindeer, unknown to the Edda except as a wild beast, and the horse. What has been repeatedly said often comes to be commonly believed, but it is nevertheless not always, nor here, entirely true. What Middendorff has endorsed, however, when qualified by what Ahlquist (" Die Kulturwiirter der Westfinnischen Sprachen," 1875, p. 9) has written, is decisive as to the conclusion that this Turanian people had domesticated the horse before they came in contact with the German or Scandinavian men and tongues. And from Ahlquist I learn that though the Finns do use the Indogermanic loan-words "hepo," 44 hevonen," when speaking of the horse, irrespectively of its sex, they nevertheless use Turanian vocables to distinguish the stallion and the mare. The significance of this fact cannot be over-rated, though it will be enhanced by a little acquaintance with the language in vogue in stables and amongst " horsey " men. On the other hand, the particular specimen of Berkshire utterances I have given above will throw some doubt on the following reasoning of Ahlquist's :—" Filr castrirtes Pferd hat das Finniscbe degegen keinen eigenen Ausdruck, wahrscheinlich deshalb weil diese Art das Thier zu verstummeln erst spiiterhin und zwar von den Nachbarvolkern Eingang bei den Finuen gefunden." And the Welsh are precisely like the Finns, Pro- fessor Rhys tells me, in having but two welds for the very same three meanings which the words just quoted refer to.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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