ZOOLOGICAL 
BURCHELL ZEBRA IN THE UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 
RESTORE THE 
SOCIETY 
BURCHELL 
BULLETIN 19 
ZEBRA 
By W.'T. Hornapay. 
WO recent arrivals at the Zoological Park 
from South Africa present an excuse for 
recording certain impressions that we long 
have entertained. 
For reasons best known to herself Dame 
Nature saw fit to create and install in Africa a 
brilliant display of the Horse Family. Begin- 
ning with the Somali wild ass, entirely destitute 
of body markings, she began to decorate with 
stripes. Her first experiments were with the 
quagga, now extinct. Gaining confidence with 
the few experimental stripes laid upon the body 
of that animal, she next tackled a more northern 
group and with an excellent outfit of body stripes 
turned out Burchell’s zebra, with white legs. 
Feeling mightily pleased with that effort, she 
decorated other groups with few or many leg 
stripes,and some mighty broad stripes laid across 
the hindquarters. When tired of the monotony 
of plain black-velvet stripes on white or tan, she 
developed the “shadow-stripe’’, and upon one 
group she laid so many that they took permanent 
root, and produced the Chapman zebra. 
Finally, up in British East Africa and Abys- 
sinia, she took the largest and most heavily eared 
of all zebras and indulged in a final orgy. Ona 
pure white ground she painted narrow black 
stripes galore, until the total number was be- 
wildering and there was no room left for even 
one more. Far down the corridor of time, man 
at last caught up with that species and called it 
the Grevy zebra, in honor of a French president 
who never in bis life saw a wild zebra in its na- 
tive haunt. 
The writer's intimate acquaintance with the 
Burchell Zebra began in 1888, when he secured 
from the Chief Animal Man of the Barnum and 
Bailey Show a fine male specimen, and mounted 
it for the National Museum, where it may today 
be seen. A picture of it is shown herewith. So 
far as we know, its status as a typical burchelli 
is not questioned. 
For several years, word has been passing 
around among British and American mammalog- 
ists to the effect that “the true Burchell zebra is 
practically extinct,’ and people began several 
years ago to take account of the Burchell stock in 
the museums. Some living specimens in Rhode- 
sia and the Transvaal that by South African 
naturalists were regarded as true burchelli, were 
