434 THE ORIGIN OF THE LIBYAN HORSE [CH. 



our domestic races, no matter what their form and colour, are 

 descended) were of a dun colour. 



But he himself points out that though "all English breeds 

 however unlike in size and appearance, and several of those in 

 India and the Malay Archipelago, present a similar range and 

 diversity of colour, the English race-horse, however, is said never 

 to be dun-coloured." He thought 1 that this might be explained 

 by the fact that " as dun and cream-coloured horses are con- 

 sidered by the Arabs worthless and fit only for Jews to ride, 

 these tints may have been removed by long-continued se- 

 lection." But as it has been demonstrated that the Arabs did 

 not develope their famous horses by selection solely from the 

 dun-coloured horses of ancient Persia or any other part of 

 Asia, but, several centuries after Christ, obtained it from North 

 Africa, where it was already of a dark colour at least a 

 thousand years before the Arabs ever possessed a horse, it is 

 obvious that Darwin's theory of the origin of the bay colour is 

 based on a false assumption. 



Again, as we have shown that whenever horses of a light 

 colour are met with in Arabia, and in other parts of Western 

 Asia, they are always kadishes, or in other words the coarse, 

 thick-set, slow type of Upper Asia, the contempt of the Arabs 

 for such horses is due to the fact that horses so coloured are 

 always inferior, and not to any dislike of their livery, since 

 they hold, as we do, that "a good horse is never of a bad 

 colour," and we have also seen (p. 186) that the Arabs, like 

 many other peoples, from religious motives have a preference 

 for white and grey horses. It is then clear that Darwin's 

 explanation of the dark colour of the English race-horse and 

 his progenitors does not supply a vera causa. 



If the bay colour of the Libyan horse has only been acquired 

 by artificial breeding, and if, as Darwin held 2 , "colour is a fleeting 

 characteristic," the descendants of such horses when they 

 become feral and return to a state of nature ought to revert to 

 dun colour, or at least show a tendency to do so. Yet we have 

 seen that although the Pampas horses descended from some 



1 Variation, Vol. i. p. 58. 2 Variation, Vol. i, p. 53. 



