THE ARAB AND THE THOROUGHBRED.*
THE two books before us, dissimilar in all else, are alike in their view of the Arab as the main and most valuable
ingredient in modern thoroughbred stock. Sir James Boucaut's work is a practical appeal to his countrymen to abandon present ideals of breeding, while the other is a most learned and elaborate treatise on the origin of such ideals.
The one points the moral, the other provides the historical justification. It would be difficult for Professor Ridgeway
to write a book which did not contain at least one wholly novel thesis, and the present work is no exception to his practice. It is also an encyclopaedia of information on the history of the Equidae, collected from every source, from post-Pleiocene deposits to modern sporting newspapers. No detail escapes the author's industry, and he is as industrious in tracking the horse through Assyrian inscriptions, and the Greek classics, and the Icelandic sagas, as in classifying existing varieties from the records of naturalists. The result is a monument of sound learning, unique of its kind, the only fault lying in the often erratic arrangement of the material. The book is partly a thesis, partly an encyclopaedia, and while nothing could be more logical that the structure of the thesis, Professor Ridgeway, when merely setting down information, is apt to flit among countries and ages with a dexterity which perplexes the reader.
The Equidae at the present moment comprise fifteen species, of which three are horses,—the Equus Caballus, the Celtic pony, and the Central Asian animal known as Prejvalsky's horse. The asses are more numerous ; and of the zebras, the third great division, there are some six varieties, and a seventh, the quagga, which was once plentiful. Mouth of the Orange River, but is now as extinct as the dodo. Professor Ridgeway's account of the zebras, in which he deals with Professor Cossar Ewart's experiments, is one of the most interesting in the book, and we may well regret that the quagga, the most fit for domestication, by general consent, of all the striped Equidae, should no longer adorn the fauna of the world. It is, however, with the Equus Caballus that the author is mainly concerned, and the first steps in the long descent of the thoroughbred. He is a very old inhabitant of the globe, for his remains are found in caves of the late- Palaeolithic period. Both Europe and Asia possessed an indigenous horse, dun or white in colour, heavy, large-headed, and thick-necked, and it is from the interbreeding of these with the finer and darker types, of which the Arab is the chief, that most modern varieties have arisen. At this point appears Professor Ridgeway's new thesis. Pure Arab horses, as we know them to-day, are descended from one or other of five great strains, called Al Khamseh, which are generally believed to be indigenous to Arabia. But Professor Ridge- way maintains that, according to the testimony of the geographers Eratosthenes and Strabo, the Arabs did not breed, or even possess, horses till after the beginning of the Christiamera. Then they seem to have imported a dark type by way of Palestine ; but whence came these Palestine horses P The answer is that they were part of a great export from Egypt which began before 1000 B.C. We know on good authority that the Kings of the Eighteenth Egyptian Dynasty possessed horses of a breed wholly different from the indigenous light-coloured horses of Europe and Asia, but closely resembling the Arab and Barbary horse of to-day ; and long before the Christian era such horses were sought by horse-lovers all over the Mediterranean and Western Asia. Whence in turn did the Egyptians derive their horses ? Professor Ridgeway discards the theory which ascribes their origin to the Hyksos conquerors or to some other Semitic people, and maintains that they came from the Ethiopians and Nubians dwelling on the left bank of the Nile. The "Libyan Horse," then, small, docile, lightly built, fleet, and dark in colour, is the source of the finer stocks of which the Arab is the chief. We have not space even to sketch the evidence by which Professor Ridgeway supports this conclusion, but it seems to us that he has succeeded in proving his point. The Libyan horse went early to Spain and was the foundation of the much esteemed Spanish horse of a later clay, which in turn was the • (1) The Origin and Influence of the Thoroughbred Horse. By William Ridge. way, M.A., Disney Professor of Archaeology. Cambridge :at the University Press. [12s. 6d. net._]—(2) The drab the Horse of the Future. By the on. Sir J. P. Boueaut, With a Preface by Sir Walter Oulbey, Bark London: Gay and Bird. [7s. 6d. net.] parent stock of the early Irish horses. In the same way, the horses of Gaul and Greece in classical times were largely sprung from Libyan blood. The bay breed, which was found in the Troad before 1000 B.C., and which was regarded as divine, came from Libya, whence Pegasus' also was fabled to have sprung. The possession of good horses was indeed the first step in the greatness of all races, whether Egyptians, Medea, Peraians, or Franks, and " the acquisition of the horse by the Arabs was a main factor in the spreading of Islam." On the ultimate origin of the Libyan breed it is impossible to dogmatise. Wild horses may have passed into Africa in pre- historic times from Asia or Europe, and under the special conditions of African life have developed their peculiar build and colouring. Professor Ridgeway thinks that the same conditions produced the colouring of the Libyan horse and the quagga. "The evidence of its characteristic bay colour, the not infrequent occurrence of stripes on its head, body, and legs, its dark skin resembling that of the zebras, its special fecundity in North Africa, all point to its being no merely artificial breed, formed under domestication by careful selection by man, but indicate clearly that it is a distinct variety developed during a long succession of time in Libya, under conditions similar to those which have produced some of the zebras, with their finely formed limbs, their dark skin, and striped bodies." The other alternative—that it is the result of crossing the domestic horse from Asia with some variety of striped African Equidae—is refuted by Professor Oossar Ewart's recent experiments, which show the sterility of zebra-horse hybrids.
Another part of Professor Ridgeway's work will be of more interest to the ordinary reader, that in which he describes the growth of English horse-breeding. From the old English "great horse," used for war in days of heavy armour, descend our Clydesdales, Shires, Suffolk Punches, and, after much crossing, our heavy chargers. The thoroughbred originated in the reign of Charles II. with the importation of Turk and Arab horses, and by dint of careful breeding we have at last arrived at a large light animal of exceptional speed but no staying power. It is as a protest against the modern thoroughbred that Sir James Boucaut's book has been written. Like the hero of the poem, his " heart is with the horsemen of Yemen," and he urges the reintroduction of the smaller stronger Arab, both on practical and moral grounds. The present system of racing over short courses with horses which represent a wholly artificial growth is, in his opinion, a degradation of sport and horse-breeding, and benefits only the gambler and the tipster. In view of Professor Ridge- way's treatise, his historical sections have little importance, and his argument in favour of the existence of horses in Arabia before the Christian era will scarcely carry conviction. But on the practical side his protest has much truth, and we hope it will be taken to heart not only by Australian but by English breeders. He points out that the Boer pony, which is of the Arab class, proved an infinitely more useful animal in war than our heavier horses. The old class of Australian horses, in which Arab blood predominated, were capable of going ninety miles straight off the grass, an exploit impossible to those animals which he calls cacophonously but truly " speedy weeds." He urges us to recognise, as Oliver Cromwell did, the uselessness of heavy soft horses, whatever their pace, and to revert to the Arab, from which all that is good in the thoroughbred has come. " The most certain mode of recuperating the breed of saddle and buggy horses, and even of the thoroughbred himself, as a real race- horse, would be the infusion of a large amount of pure and fresh Arab blood of the desert breed." If we lose height in the process, height, as Sir Walter Gilbey has pointed out, is the last consideration that need weigh with us in the produc- tion of a useful horse. We wish Sir James Boucaut had been at a little more pains to arrange his interesting book, and had cumbered it less with a multitude of trivial quota- tions. But with his main thesis, and his denunciation of the vices which have fastened round an artificial form of sport, we are in the fullest agreement.
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