Chap. II. THEIR COLOURS AND STRIPES. 63 



coexist on the different parts of the body : the legs may he 

 striped without any shoulder-stripe, or the converse case, 

 which is rarer, may occur ; but I have never heard of either 

 shoulder or leg-stripes without the spinal stripe. The latter is 

 by far the commonest of all the stripes, as might have been 

 expected, as it characterises the other seven or eight species 

 of the genus. It is remarkable that so trifling a character as 

 the shoulder-stripe being double or triple should occur in 

 such different breeds as Welch and Devonshire ponies, the 

 Shan pony, heavy cart-horses, light South American horses, 

 and the lanky Kattywar breed. Colonel Hamilton Smith 

 believes that one of his five supposed primitive stocks was 

 dun- coloured and striped ; and that the stripes in all the 

 other breeds result from ancient crosses with this one primi- 

 tive dun ; but it is extremely improbable that different 

 breeds living in such distant quarters of the world should all 

 have been crossed with any one aboriginally distinct stock. 

 Nor have we any reason to believe that the effects of a cross 

 at a very remote period would be propagated for so many 

 generations as is implied on this view. 



With respect to the primitive colour of the horse having 

 been dun, Colonel Hamilton Smith 41 has collected a large 

 body of evidence showing that this tint was common in the 

 East as far back as the time of Alexander, and that the wild 

 horses of Western Asia and Eastern Europe now are, or re- 

 cently were, of various shades of dun. It seems that not very 

 long ago a wild breed of dun-coloured horses with a spinal 

 stripe was preserved in the royal parks in Prussia. I hear 

 from Hungary that the inhabitants of that country look at 

 the duns with a spinal stripe as the aboriginal stock, and so 

 it is in Norway. Dun-coloured ponies are not rare in the 

 mountainous parts of Devonshire, Wales, and Scotland, where 

 the aboriginal breed would have the best chance of being 



41 'Nat. Library,' vol. xii. (1841), the East, who speaks of dun and brown 



pp. 109, 156 to 163, 280, 281. as the prevalent colours. In the 



Cream-colour, passing into Isabella Icelandic sagas, which were committed 



(i.e. the colour of the dirty linen of to writing in the twelfth century, 



Queen Isabella), seems to have been dun-coloured horses with a black 



common in ancient times. See also spinal stripe are mentioned; see 



Pallas's account of the wild horses of Dasent's translation, vol. i. p. 169 



