'White-breasted Bran,' the dog of Fingal, in his possession of an ear like a leaf.'

It is not too much to say that the opposed sentiments concerning the relations of men with animals displayed in the Iliad and Odyssey suffice in themselves to establish their diversity of origin. For they render it psychologically impossible that they could have been the work of one individual. The varying prominence assigned respectively to the horse and the dog might, it is true, be plausibly accounted for by the diversified conditions of the two epics; but no shifting of scene can explain a reversal of sympathies. Such sentiments form part of the ingrained structure of the mind. They take root before consciousness is awake, or memory active; they live through the decades of a man's life; are transported with him from shore to shore; survive the enthusiasm of friendship and the illusions of ambition; they can no more be eradicated from the tenor of his thoughts than the type of his features can be changed from Tartar to Caucasian, or the colour of his eyes from black to blue.

After all, the difficulty of separating the origin of these stupendous productions is considerably diminished by the reflection that they are but the surviving members of an extensive group of poems, all originally attributed without discrimination to a single author. Not the Iliad and Odyssey alone, but the 'Cypria,' the Ethiopis,' the 'Lesser Iliad,' and

other voluminous metrical compositions, were, in the old, uncritical, individual sense, Homeric.' So apt is Fame to make

A testament

As worldlings do, giving the sum of more

To that which had too much.

The depreciatory tone of the query, 'What's in a name?' should not lead us to undervalue that indispensable requisite to sustained and specialised existence. A name is, indeed, a power in itself. It serves, at the least, as a peg to hang a personality upon, and not the most powerful rhyme' can sustain a reputation apart from its humble aid. But the bard of Odysseus has long ceased to possess one. His only appellation must remain for all time that of his hero in the Cyclops' cave. The jealous Muses have blotted him out from memory. We can only be sure that he was a man who, like the protagonist of his immortal poem, had known, and scen, and suffered many things, who had tears for the past, and hopes for the future, had roamed far and near with a 'hungry heart,' and had listened long and intently to the 'many voices' of the moaning sea; who had tried his fellow-men, and found them, not all, nor everywhere wanting; who had faith in the justice of Heaven and the constancy of woman; who had experienced and had not disdained to cherish in his heart the life-long fidelity of a dog.

:

CHAPTER IV.

HOMERIC HORSES.

THE greater part of the Continent of Europe, including Britain, not then, perhaps, insulated by a silver streak,' was prehistorically overrun with shaggy ponies, large-headed and heavily-built, but shown by their short, pointed cars and brush-tails to have been genuine horses, exempt from leanings towards the asinine branch of the family. This, indeed, would be a hazardous statement to make upon the sole evidence of the fragmentary piles of these animals' bones preserved in caves and mounds; since even a complete skeleton could tell the most experienced anatomist nothing as to the shape of their ears or the growth of hair upon their tails. We happen, however, to be in possession of their portraits. For the men of that time had artistic instincts, and drew with force and freedom whatever seemed to them worthy of imitation; and among their few subjects the contemporary wild horse was fortunately included. With his outward aspect, then, we are, through the medium of

these diluvial grafiti, on bone-surfaces and stags' antlers, thoroughly familiar.

It was that of a sturdy brute, thirteen or fourteen hands high, not ill represented, on a reduced scale, by the Shetland ponies of our own time, but untamed, and, it might have been thought, untameable. The race had not then found its true vocation. Man was enabled, by his superior intelligence, to make it his prey, but had not yet reached the higher point of enlisting its matchless qualities in his service. Horses were, accordingly, neither ridden nor driven, but hunted and eaten. Piles of bones still attest the hippophagous habits of the 'stone-men.' At Solutré, near Mâcon, a veritable equine Golgotha has been excavated; similar accumulations were found in the recesses of Monte Pellegrino in Sicily; and Sir Richard Owen made the curious remark that, evidently through gastronomic selection, the osseous remains of colts and fillies vastly predominated, in the débris from the cave of Bruniqucl, over those of full-grown horses.'

The descent of our existing horses from the caveanimals is doubtful, Eastern importations having at any rate greatly improved and modified the breed. Wild horses, indeed, still at the end of the sixteenth century roamed the slopes of the Vosges, and were hunted as game in Poland and Lithuania; but they

1 Phil. Trans. 1869, p. 535.

* Hehn and Stallybrass, Wanderings of Plants and Animals, pp 38-39.

may have been muzins, or runaways, like the mus. tangs on the American prairies. Nowadays, certainly, the animal is found in a state of aboriginal freedom nowhere save on the steppes of Central Asia, in the primitive home of the race. There, in all likelihood, the noblest of brute-forms was brought to perfection; there it was dominated by man; and thence equestrian arts, with their manifold results for civilisation, were propagated among the nations of the world. They were taught to the Egyptians, it would seem, by their shepherd conquerors, but were not learned by the Arabs until a couple of millenniums later, the Arab contingent in Xerxes' army having been a 'camel-corps.' The Persians, indeed, early picked up the habit of riding from the example of their Tartar neighbours; yet that it was no original Aryan accomplishment, the absence of a common Aryan word to express the idea sufficiently shows. The relations of our primitive ancestors with the animal had, at the most, reached what might be called the second, or Scythian stage, when droves of halfwild horses took the place of cattle, and mares' milk was an important article of food. The aboriginal cavalry of the desert belonged, on the other hand, to the wide kinship of Attila's Huns, who, separated from their steeds, were as helpless as swans on shore. The war-chariot, however, was an Assyrian invention, dating back at least to the seventeenth century B.C. It quickly reached Egypt on one side, India on the