HORSES OF THE BRITISH ISLANDS 123 



agrees essentially in relative proportions with that 

 of the Iceland pony. 



Assuming Dr. Stejneger's opinions to be trust- 

 worthy, it follows, in view of the near affinity of 

 the Russian tarpan to its truly wild Mongolian 

 namesake to which reference has been made in 

 the preceding chapter, that if the Celtic pony and 

 the Barb are divergent branches of a common 

 ancestral stock, the Arab is first cousin to the 

 Mongolian tarpan a relationship which few will 

 be disposed to admit. 



But there is another way of looking at the 

 matter, namely, that if we accept the evidence as 

 to the infusion of Barb blood into the Connemara 

 ponies, and also that the latter formed the source 

 of the ponies of Iceland, the Hebrides, &c., the 

 Celtic pony may apparently have derived its Arab 

 characteristics from the same original infusion into 

 an ancestral stock akin to the Prehistoric horses 

 of La Madelaine and to the modern Mongolian 

 tarpan. 



The case has been put very concisely by Dr. 

 R. F. Sharff 1 in a paper on horse-skulls from 

 Ireland, in which it is remarked that " the principal 

 point of difference seems to me whether the Arab 

 or Libyan features, as Professor Ridgeway would 

 call them, in the Irish [i.e. Celtic] horse are the 

 result of introductions by mankind of Eastern 



1 Proc. R. Irish Academy, Dublin, vol. xxvii, ser. B, p. 85, 1909. 



