Search -
The Wanderings of Plants and Animals From Their First Home
The Wanderings of Plants and Animals From Their First Home Author:Victor Hehn General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1885 Original Publisher: S. Sonnenschein and co. Subjects: Biogeography Domesticated animals Plants, Cultivated Indo-Europeans Indo-European languages Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or miss... more »ing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: THE HORSE. (equus Caballus.) The noble horse, the darling and companion of the hero, the delight of poets (witness the splendid descriptions in the Book of Job and in Homer's Iliad) -- that glossy, proud, aristocratic, quivering, nervous animal, with its rhythmic action -- has his home nevertheless in one of the wildest and most inhospitable regions of the world -- the steppes and pasture-lands of Central Asia, the realm of storms. There, we are assured, the wild horse still roams under the name of Tarpan, which tarpan cannot always be distinguished from the only half-wild Musin, or fugitive from tame or half-tame herds. It grazes in troops, under a wary leader, always moving against the wind, nostrils and ears alert to every danger, and not seldom struck by a wild panic which drives it full speed across the immeasurable plain. During the terrible winter of the steppes, it scrapes the snow away with its hoofs, and scantily feeds on the dead grasses and leaves which it finds beneath. It has a thick, flowing mane and bushy tail, and when the winter cold commences, the hair all over its body grows into a kind of thin fur. And in this very region lived the first equestrian races of whom we have any knowledge -- in the east the Mongols, in the west the Turks; taking those names in their widest sense. Even now the existence of these races is bound up with that of the horse. The Mongol thinks it shameful to go on foot; he is always on horseback, and when he o...« less