436 THE ORIGIN OF THE LIBYAN HORSE [CH. 



Africa. We have seen that the quagga, whose habitat was 

 bounded by the Vaal River on the north and extended as far 

 as lat. 32° S., had not only divested itself of its stripes to a still 

 greater degree than the Burehell zebra, but had assumed a 

 general bay colour except on its lower parts. 



Mr Pocock^ has admirably traced the various gradations in 

 coloration from Grant's zebra in North-east Africa to that of 

 the Quaggas in the Cape Colony. The first of these is striped 

 all over down to the very hoofs with black in strong contrast to 

 its white ground colour, but even in British and German East 

 Africa " the pale interspaces begin to be washed with brown 

 and to be filled in with narrow intervening stripes, and such 

 forms are difficult to distinguish from E. selousi of the 

 Mashonaland plateau. From these may be traced a series of 

 gradations represented by the local races named after Chapman, 

 Wahlberg, and Burehell, in Avhich the stripes gradually dis- 

 appear and thin upwards from the fetlocks to the shoulders 

 and haunches, while those on the body lose their connection 

 with the mid-ventral band and becomino- shorter leave the 

 belly unstriped. Concomitantly the intervening ' shadow ' 

 stripes increase in number and definition as they extend for- 

 wards towards the neck, then the normal stripes themselves 

 turn brown, and the ochre-stained brown colour deepens in 

 hue. In Burchell's the shadow stripes reach the head, and the 

 last of the complete stripes is the one that extends backwards 

 from the stifles to the root of the tail, the hindquarters and the 

 legs being practically, and the belly actually, stripeless. It is 

 but a step from this to the extinct Grey's quagga, in which the 

 stripes of the body were fused together and blended to a great 

 extent with the brown of the intervening areas, those on the 

 neck being exceedingly broad, and broken up by paler tracts of 

 hair." 



This process is admirably illustrated by the head and 

 neck (Figs. 131 — 3) of a quagga, hitherto unnoticed by the 

 students of the Equidae, to which my attention was called by 

 my friend Dr W. L. H. Duckworth-, M.A., Fellow of Jesus 



1 ' The Coloration of the Quaggas,' Nature, 1903, pp. 356-7. 



- Dr Duckworth (who has laid me under many obligations) on a hasty visit 



