326 Mr. R. I. Pocock on 



the additional eighteen years' exposure to sunlight, is not in 

 any sense comparable in extent to what must have taken 

 place in the type of E. quagga Greyi, if the latter, as 

 Mr. Lydekker thinks, also resembled the typical quagga in 

 colour. Looking at the types of Wahlhergi and Greyi side 

 by side, and bearing in mind the length of time the two have 

 been exhibited in the public gallery at the British Museum, 

 I find it impossible to attribute the present colour of the type 

 of Greyi to extensive and unequal fading, and incredible that 

 the body and neck were ever uniformly banded with black 

 stripes separated by bay-, fawn-, or ochre-coloured interspaces 

 of the same tone on the neck as on the body. A comparison 

 between the type of E. quagga Selousi and the Amsterdam 

 quagga, both of which date from 1883, enforces the same 

 conclusion with regard to the last-named animal. 



Finally, the specimen of the typical E. Barchelli in the 

 Bristol Museum has been exhibited within my recollection 

 for at least thirty years, and for a considerable portion of that 

 time without even such protection as glass affords. It has 

 thus been exposed to fading agencies for a much longer time 

 than has the quagga in the Amsterdam Museum ; yet the 

 camera shows all the original stripes on the body and hind- 

 quarters very clearly, as is attested by the photograph of the 

 animal published in the Proc. Zool. Soc. 1903, ii. p. 197. 



These facts prove that even after sixty years' exposure the 

 stripes in quaggas of the Burchelline type remain sharply 

 defined and fade merely from black to chocolate, and that the 

 pigment of the interspaces upon the body and rump is as 

 durable as that of the neck and head. 



Mr. Lydekker's hypothesis, therefore, that the present 

 coloration of the quaggas in the British and Amsterdam 

 Museums is the result of forty and twenty years' exposure to 

 fading influences acting upon skins formerly coloured like 

 the quagga figured by Edwards, is discredited by what is 

 known of the fading capacity of skins of specimens of various 

 races of Burchell's Quagga exposed to similar influences for 

 sixty, thirty, and twenty years respectively, and must, in my 

 opinion, be regarded as entirely disproved by York's photo- 

 graph of the living quagga, which shows an animal resem- 

 bling the aforesaid stuffed examples in all respects essential 

 to the argument. 



For these reasons I resuscitate Mr. Lydekker's subspecies 

 E. quagga Greyi. 



The following table summarizes the characters of the four 

 subspecies discussed above : — 



