Ponies past and present

The Footnotes have been changed from alpha to numeric.
Painted by A. Cooper, R.A. Engraved on wood by F. Babbage.
THE SHOOTING PONY.
PONIES PAST AND PRESENT
BY SIR WALTER GILBEY, Bart.
ILLUSTRATED
VINTON & CO., Ltd., 9, NEW BRIDGE STREET, LONDON, E.C.
1900
The increasing attention which during the last few years has been devoted to breeding ponies for various purposes, more especially for polo, suggested the collection of facts relating to our half-wild races of ponies. It will be seen from the following pages that we possess large supplies of small but strong and sound constitutioned horses which may be turned to far more valuable account than has been done hitherto. The Polo Pony Society set the example of drawing attention to the possibilities of utilising profitably the Moorland and Forest Mares, and it is hoped that these pages may be of some interest to those who are giving attention to pony breeding whether for polo or for any other purpose.
Elsenham Hall, Essex, August, 1900.
In another volume, Horses Past and Present , brief reference has been made to the early subjugation of the horse in Eastern countries by man; and it is unnecessary here to further touch upon that phase of our subject.
The early history of the horse in the British Islands is obscure. The animal is not indigenous to the country, and it is supposed that the original stock was brought to England many centuries before the Christian era by the Phœnician navigators who visited the shores of Cornwall to procure supplies of tin. However that may be, the first historian who rendered any account of our islands for posterity found here horses which he regarded as of exceptional merit. Julius Cæsar, when he invaded Britain in the year 55 B.C., was greatly impressed with the strength, handiness, and docility of the horses which the ancient Britons drove in their war chariots; his laudatory description of their merits includes no remark concerning their size, and from this omission we may infer that they were not larger than the breeds of horses with which Cæsar’s travels and conquests had already made him acquainted.