226 THE HORSE AND ITS RELATIVES 



omission of the ch being compensated by the 

 lengthening of the preceding vowel. Muchlos 

 appears to have been taken from the Phocseans, who 

 were the mariners and colonisers of the West/ As 

 already mentioned incidentally, the mule is properly 

 the product of the male ass and the mare, the 

 converse hybrid — that is to say, the product of 

 crossing a stallion with a she-ass — being termed 

 hinny, a word derived, through the Latin kmnus, 

 from the Greek hinnos, or ginos. 



Mule has, however, come to be used for any 

 hybrid, e.g. a mule-canary. 



With the possible exception of a few instances 

 in which the female is stated to have produced 

 offspring, the mule is sterile ; as, indeed, might be 

 expected to be the case when the difference 

 between its parents is borne in mind. 



On this subject Sir E. Ray Lankester has 

 written as follows in one of his articles, " Science 

 from an Easy-Chair," published in the Daily 

 Telegraph : — 



" A good case by which to exemplify our concep- 

 tion of a species is that afforded by the species 

 which are united in the genus Equus — the horse- 

 genus. There are living at the present day several 

 wild kinds of Equus — namely, the wild horse, or 

 tarpan, of the Gobi desert of Mongolia, called after 

 Przewalski ; two kinds of Asiatic wild ass, called 



^ Heyn and Stallybrass, op. cit., pp. 461, 462. 



