ANALOGOUS VARIATIONS. 153 



plainest in the foal, and sometimes quite disappear in old 

 horses. Colonel Poole has seen both gray and bay Katty- 

 war horses striped when first foaled. I have also reason to 

 suspect, from information given me by Mr. W. \\ . Ed- 

 wards, that with the English race-horse the spinal stripe is 

 much commoner in the foal than in the full-grown animal. 

 I have myself recently bred a foal from a bay mare (off- 

 spring of a Turkoman horse and a Flemish mare) by a bay 

 English race-horse. This foal, when a week old, was 

 marked on its hinder quarters and on its forehead with 

 numerous very narrow, dark, zebra-like bars, and its legs 

 were feebly striped. All the stripes soon disappeared com- 

 pletely. Without here entering on further details I may 

 state that I have collected cases of leg and shoulder-stripes 

 in horses of very different breeds in various countries from 

 Britain to Eastern China, and from Norway in the north 

 to the Malay Archipelago in the south. In all parts of the 

 world these stripes occur far oftenest in duns and mouse- 

 duns. By the term dun a large range of color is included, 

 from one between brown and black to a close approach to 

 cream color. 



I am aware that Colonel Hamilton Smith, who has writ- 

 ten on this subject, believes that the several breeds of the 

 horse are descended from several aboriginal species, one of 

 which, the dun, was striped; and that the above-described 

 appearances are all due to ancient crosses with the dun 

 stock. But this view may be safely rejected, for it is 

 higlily improbable that the heavy Belgian cart-horse, 

 Welsh ponies, Norwegian cobs, the lanky Kattywar race, 

 etc., inhabiting the most distant parts of the world, 

 should all have been crossed with one supposed aboriginal 

 stock. 



Now let us turn to the effects of crossing the several 

 species of the horse genus. Eollin asserts that the com- 

 mon mule from the ass and horse is particularly apt to 

 have bars on its legs; according to Mr. Gosse, in certain 

 parts of the United States, about nine out of ten mules 

 have striped legs. I once saw a mule with its legs so much 

 striped that any one might have thought that it was a 

 hybrid zebra; and Mr. W. C. Martin, in his excellent 

 treatise on the horse, has given a figure of a similar mule. 

 In four colored drawings, which I have seen, of liybridu 



