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II] THE EXISTING EQUIDAE 41 



and the character of the tail render it all the more certain 

 that there was a primitive variety of horse which had these 

 characteristics so strongly marked that they cannot be easily 

 blurred by crossing with hoi'ses of the ordinary domestic type. 



Quite recently Dr Salensky^ has urged strongly that Equus 

 przewalskii is a true variety of Equus. He gives the charac- 

 teristics of the Prejvalsky horse as the considerable size of 

 the head, the want of a forelock, the upright mane, the back 

 and shoulder stripes, the characteristic form of the tail, which 

 in some particulars resembles that of the koulan, the size 

 of the ears, which are smaller than in the ass or koulan, and 

 the coloration of the rump, the lower parts of the body, and 

 the striping on the legs, and he holds that the examination 

 of the skull and skeleton leads us, as do the external marks, 

 to the conclusion that Prejvalsky's horse represents a special 

 type, which forms a peculiar race of the sub-species of Equus 

 standing next to Equus caballus. In comparing Equus prze- 

 walskii to other horses he considers that the Tarpan comes 

 first in importance, a view obviously correct in face of the 

 considerations which have been urged above. He starts by 

 citing Gmelin's notice of the Tarpan, the earliest in modern 

 times at least (in his Reise durch Russland). That traveller 

 had the opportunity of seeing them at Bobrowsk (gov. Woronesh), 

 and he describes them as mouse-coloured " with short and crisp 

 mane " {mit kurzer und kraushaariger Mdhne) and says that 

 their legs were black from the knee to the hoof, the head 

 disproportionately thick. The ears sometimes long as in the 

 ass, and hanging, the tail always shorter than in domestic 

 horses, being sometimes well furnished, sometimes sparsely. 

 But Salensky relies chiefly on the official description of a 

 Tarpan captured in 1866 in the ZagradofF steppe on the 

 property of Prince Kotschubei (gov. Cherson) and which was 

 still in the Zoological Gardens at Moscow in 1884. This 

 animal had a forelock but had no callosities on its hind-legs. 

 It was a dark mouse-colour, the legs from hocks and knees 

 down to the pasterns being very black, whilst it had a mane 



1 Equus przewalskii (Comptes-Kendus of Imperial Eussian Academy, ] 902), 

 from which my illustration of Prejvalsky's horse (Fig. 18) is taken. 



