72 THE EXISTING EQUIDAE [CH. 



stripes reached back as far as the buttocks; they were however 

 completely absent from the legs. 



The first description of the quagga is that given by 

 G. Edwards 1 in 1758: "For size and shape it is much like 

 the last described (i.e. the Mountain Zebra). To speak of its 

 general colour (exclusive of its stripes, which are all black), the 

 head, neck, upper part of the body, and thighs, are of a bright- 

 bay colour : its belly, legs, and the end of the tail are white : on 

 the joints of the legs it has such corns as we see in horses : the 

 hoofs are blackish : the head is striped a little different from 

 the last described (Mountain Zebra) : the mane is black and 

 white : the ears are of a bay colour : it is a little white in the 

 forehead : it hath several broad stripes round the neck, which 

 become narrow on its under side : it hath a black list along the 

 ridge of the back, and part of the tail, and another along the 

 middle of the belly ; the stripes on the body proceed from the 

 list on the back, and some of them end in forks on the sides of 

 the belly, others in single points, and these have some longish 

 spots between them. The hinder part of the body is spotted in 

 a more confused, irregular manner. The two sides of this, as 

 well as the last described, were marked very uniformly. The 

 noise it made was much different from that of an ass, resembling 

 more the confused barking of a mastiff dog 2 ." 



1 Gleanings of Natural History (London, 1758), p. 29, PI. 223. (Cited by 

 Mr Pocock, Ann. Mag. Nat. Hist., 1 Nov., 1904.) My illustration is a reduced 

 facsimile of the plate from the drawing made by G. Edwards himself "from the 

 living animal belonging to his Koyal Highness the Prince of Wales," in 1751. 

 The legend under the plate is Zebra femina, sive Asina sylvestris Africana, the 

 animal being considered the female of the Mountain Zebra, figured on Plate 27 

 of the same work and labelled Zebra mas, sive Asinus sylvestris Africanus, the 

 latter being drawn from a stuffed skin. It was believed that the quagga was the 

 female of the Mountain Zebra. Edwards states that he " never saw a skin 

 brought over agreeing with this, which makes it a much greater curiosity than 

 the male. I suppose the skins of the female are not counted so beautiful as 

 those of the male, for which reason they are not brought to us. The female 

 hath not till now been figured or described." 



2 On the other hand, Thomas Pringle, the well-known poet of South Africa, 

 in his poem " Afar in the Desert," describes it thus : 



" Afar in the desert I love to ride, 

 With the silent bush boy alone by my side ; 



