- A Hybridity in Animals. 
The phenomenon of productiveness has little or no limit among 
the true horses; whence it has been inferred that they all belong 
to one species; and that their various forms and colors are solely — 
owing to the diversified circumstances in which they have been 
placed. But the researches of Hamilton Smith, have not only 
given rise to much doubt on this subject, but have adduced a sur- 
prising array of facts in favor of the opposite opinion. 
We must refer to his learned and elaborate essay for the mass 
of evidence therein embodied ; merely observing, on the present 
occasion, that he separates the horses into five primitive stocks, 
ich appear to constitute “distinct, though osculating species, 
or at least races separated at so rem mote a a period, that they claim to 
have oe divided | from the earliest times of our present nasi 
He : sil that some of thiede fori yet exist in the wild state 
on the table-lands of Central Asia, and that all of them were so 
constituted as to be fusible into a common, speci ut ver 
variable stock, for the purposes of man; and he finall y ‘concludes, 
that if man had been ‘necessitated to cultivate the zebras of South 
Africa, instead of the horses of Asia, he would have succeeded 
in amalgamating the three or four known species into one nase 
mestic animal, little inferior to the horse itself. oF 
“It therefore becomes a reasonable supposition that: some some vari- 
eties of the horse now known to us, may be hybrid mixtures of 
proximate species ; more especially, since the facts collected by 
Hamilton Smith, De Azara, and De la Malle, show conclusively 
that all the domestic horses were reclaimed from an original wild 
state 
Bovine Hybrids.—In the argument in question, the ox tribe 
has always been referred to as one of the strongest evidences of 
the operation of local causes in producing varieties so breed. But 
the parent type or stock is a unknown to naturalists; and 
although it corresponds in steological erm with a fossil 
species (Bos urus) found aeckbeas Europe, it is extremely doubt- 
ful whether all the modifications now familiar to man are derived 
from this animal. ‘ An opinion has lately been started,” observes 
a learned zoologist, “that the haunched varieties of cattle, are 
derived from a different species ; apie which no eanen ee ob- 
# Nesural History of the Equide, p. 154. 
t Ibid, p 183. Fossil remains ‘of the horse, and Peg ae tecel the teeth, have 
oe of ey dies abundantly found in Europe and Asia, and in North and South 
America; (and especially near Neches, by Dr. Dickerson ;) showing be this ani- 
