THE TRUE QUAGGA 1 95 



remains of Equtts quagga} This extinct species 

 is not represented in the museums of Aberdeen, 

 Brussels, Breslau, Chicago, Copenhagen, Dresden, 

 Dublin, Durban, Florence, Geneva, Grahamstown, 

 Hamburg, New York, Oxford, Prague, Pretoria, 

 Pietermaritzburg, and Washington. Save for the 

 few specimens just enumerated, and perhaps some 

 odd meal sacks of tattered hide yet remaining in 

 remote Dutch homesteads, it has passed away for 

 ever. 



A miserable history of extermination has 

 been herein narrated : now for the application 

 thereof. Immense enthusiasm marked the com- 

 mencement of ostrich-farming at the Cape in 

 1865-70 : had similar zeal been exerted, even 

 at that late hour, to save the true quagga, it 

 might have been profitably domesticated, and 

 surely a Colony which has saved the ostrich 

 for the sake of its feathers — mere ornaments 

 at best — might have bestirred herself to 

 preserve the quagga for far more practical 

 purposes. To enumerate the possible virtues of 

 a domesticated race of quaggas would be but 

 slaying the slain ; but it is sad to reflect that 



lit appears that the young quagga ( ' ' Isabella quagga " of Hamilton 

 Smith) presented by Burchell to the British Museum, is no longer in 

 the National Collection, and has probably been destroyed. Dr. Gray 

 tells us that it was nothing more than a young specimen, with nearly 

 all the fur rubbed off. This individual was probably the male of 

 the pair shot by Burchell's Hottentot attendant, Speelman, at Groote 

 Fontein, on November 14th, 1811. It was figured in 1841 by Hamilton 

 Smith in his work on the Equidae. 



