IV] THE ORIGIN OF THE LIBYAN HORSE 433 



adopted. Much of the country is now fenced and stocked with 

 sheep. I imagine that the feral horses are not to be found 

 excepting in the higher, more rugged, or scrubby country 

 outside the fencing." 



It is now clear that for various reasons herds of wild 

 horses are almost certain to be exterminated in any region 

 where the inhabitants are at all numerous and keep domestic 

 horses. 



Having rejected the view that the Libyan horse is a purely 

 artificial breed developed by the Libyans out of the ordinary 

 domestic horses of Asia and Europe, let us examine the evidence 

 in favour of the second alternative that the Libyan horses 

 were descended from wild horses which passed into North 

 Africa from Asia or from Europe or from both. 



Colonel Hamilton Smith held that our domestic horses are 

 descended from five original stirpes the bay of Western Asia, 

 i.e. Arab, the white, the black, the dun, and the pied and he 

 believed that dark stripes were a special characteristic of the 

 dun stirps. Though Darwin rejected Hamilton Smith's doctrine 

 of five original stocks, he found in the latter's dun-coloured stirps 

 with a tendency to stripes the bases of his own hypothesis. 

 From the facts that "horses in various parts of the world 

 often have a dark stripe extending along the spine, from the 

 mane to the tail," and that "occasionally horses are transversely 

 barred on the legs, chiefly on the under side," and "more rarely 

 have a distinct stripe on the shoulder, like that on the shoulder 

 of the ass, or a broad dark patch representing a stripe," and 

 from a consideration of the general tendency of horses to revert 

 to a yellow-dun hue, Darwin 1 was led to the conclusion that 

 " the seven or eight species of Equidae now existing are all 

 descended from an ancestor of a dun colour more or less 

 striped," and elsewhere 2 he argued from the results of his 

 experience in crossing pigeons and fowls that "the progenitor of 

 the group was striped on the legs, shoulders, face, and probably 

 over the whole body like a zebra." He thus assumed that the 

 first horses domesticated by man (from which he held that all 



1 Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, Vol. i. pp. 58-9. 



2 Id., Vol. ii. p. 17. 



B. H. 28 



