IV] THE ORIGIN OF THE LIBYAN HORSE 453 



one from Shetland, the other from Norway, " with the tips for 

 quite half an inch almost white. In both cases a broad dark 

 band extended across beneath the light tip 1 ." 



Prof. Ewart adds that he has seen only two ponies with stripes 

 on the face, and that he thinks that facial stripes are extremely 

 rare. The same authority 2 has " only seen faint indications of 

 stripes on the side of the face, but from what he has seen he 

 has no hesitation in saying that were a sketch made showing 

 all the stripes of which fragments have been observed on the 

 face of the horse during the present generation, the sketch 

 would closely resemble the head of one of my (Ewart 's) hybrids 

 and less closely the Amsterdam quagga." We shall see very 

 shortly that Ewart's hybrids show the decoration not of their 

 sire Matopo, a Burchell zebra of the Chapman variety, but 

 that of the Somali zebra. 



Prof. Ewart's Norwegian pony has only a short shoulder 

 stripe, and she has a number of ill-defined stripes in front of 

 the shoulder stripe 3 . She has three short stripes on the body 

 behind the shoulder stripe, and an extremely well-developed 

 dorsal band "as distinct and as broad as it crosses the croup 

 as in my Burchell zebra." The edges of this band "give off 

 short processes rudiments of developing stripes, or vestiges of 

 dwindling ones, such as are seen in some of the quaggas and in 

 zebra-ass hybrids." 



"In another light dun-coloured pony there are ten cer- 

 vical stripes. As these ten stripes only extend about half- 

 way along the neck, and as stripes are sometimes present 

 immediately behind the ears, there may have been quite 

 twenty stripes in the ancestors." 



Prof. Ewart 4 remarks that " sometimes the shoulder stripes 

 bifurcated some distance above the shoulder-joint," and thus 

 suggests not so much the zebra as the quagga and zebra- 

 hybrids, and that " as a rule the neck stripes are short and in- 

 distinct, but that in some cases he had seen three or four cervical 

 stripes nearly as well defined as in the zebras, whilst in one 

 case he had observed several stripes extending into the mane." 



1 Ewart, op. cit. p. 104. 2 Op. cit. pp. 103-4. 



3 Op. cit. p. 105. 4 Op. cit. pp. 105-6. 



