24 THE EXISTING EQUIDAE [CH. 



" About a dozen Faroe ponies have very recently been 

 imported into this country, and of these fully one-third have 

 no hock callosities, while the others have them very small. All 

 these ponies were characterised by having short hairs in the 

 upper part of the tail. Of two Icelandic ponies, also recently 

 arrived in Scotland, the hock callosities are absent in one and 

 reduced in the other, while the tail characters are similar to 

 those of the Faroe ponies." The authors give an illustration, 

 here reproduced (Fig, 17), of a Faroe pony of a better type, 

 which was stated by a native to " closely resemble the animals 

 which existed in the Faroes before the recent introduction 

 of Norwegian blood." In this animal the 'Celtic' characters 

 strongly predominate, the shorter hairs in the upper part of the 

 tail being especially noteworthy, as this character is occasionally 

 absent in the Norwegian cross-breeds ^ 



" So far," write Messrs Marshall and Annandale^ " as we 

 have been able to discover, the chief, if not the only difference 

 between the Icelandic and Faroe breeds, while they remained 

 pure, was that of colour, for while the former was, and still is, 

 typically either light dun, with a dark line down the centre of 

 the back and often with dark transverse stripes on the legs ; 

 the Faroe ponies, according to Landt, a most trustworthy 

 observer, were, at the beginning of last century, generally red, 

 and occasionally black, the skewbalds sometimes seen among 

 them at the present day being possibly descended from Icelandic 

 ancestors." Mr Daniel Brunn^ in a very valuable little work 

 on the ponies of Iceland, the Faroes and Greenland, gives 

 numerous illustrations showing the various types and colours 

 of these animals, and according to his statements the Icelandic 

 ponies can hardly now be described as " typically light dun, since 

 there are many skewbalds, chestnuts and bays." These ' Celtic ' 

 ponies of Iceland and the Faroes are, as we shall see below, 

 very different in form from the now extinct ponies of the 



1 " The Horse in Iceland," loc. cit. p. 301. Messrs Marshall and Annandale, 

 and the Council of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, have most kindly allowed 

 me to use their block. - loc. cit. 



^ Hesten i Nordboernes Tjeneste paa Island, Faer^erne og Grfinland, Saertryk 

 af " Didsskrift for Landx)konomi " (Kjobenhavn, 1002). 



