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THE EXISTING EQUIDAE 



77 



powerful means of protecting its civilized congeners from the 

 attacks of lions. Its extinction therefore is all the more 

 deplorable, and indeed no words can fitly characterize the 

 stupidity of the Dutch and English colonists, who, though 

 dependent for locomotion on horses and oxen, and frequently 

 living in areas rendered deadly to domestic horses and cattle by 

 the ravages of the tsetse-fly and horse-sickness, the latter of 

 which wrought such terrible havoc amongst the horses of the 

 British army in the recent campaigns against the Boers, and 



Fig. 39. Lord Morton's Quagga^. 



though they had in the quagga, to all intents and purposes, a 

 native horse, immune from the attacks of the pests so deadly to 

 European horses, and able to thrive on the unkindly herbage 

 of the veldt, thought only of its extermination ; and though the 

 settlers had in Burchell's Zebra at their doors an animal, which. 



^ The illustration is from the block which Prof. Ewart had made from 

 Agasse's drawing [Penycuik Exper., p. 65), and which he has most kindly 

 lent to me. 



