STEJ NEGER] } ANIMALS AND PLANTS OF NORWAY 469 
west Norway form being the more specialized type. Such a state 
of affairs would be quite consistent with my theory of the latter 
being the last link in an evolutionary distributional chain: Conti- 
nental Europe—Scotland—-Norway. Having been isolated from 
the Scotch ancestor for certainly more than ten thousand years, 
there would .be nothing surprising if the Norwegian deer had 
evolved characters of its own, and it is even possible that the ap- 
parent tendency to flattened nasals in the latter is attributable to 
this long segregation. 
III. THe Certic Horse 
During the meeting of the Edinburgh Royal Society, on De- 
eember 1, 1902, Professor |... Gossar Ewart read a paper “On a 
New Horse from the Western Islands, Equus caballus celticus” 
(Nature, Lxvi1, January 8, 1903, p. 239). It was described as a 
small pony, the principal character of which is that it agrees “ with 
the asses and zebras in having no callosities on the hind legs.” It 
was said to be “found in Iceland, Ferce, Barra, and other small 
islands of the Outer Hebrides, also in Connemara,” northwestern 
Ireland. The inference from the brief communication is that the 
Celtic horse is an exclusively west European form as compared with 
the Arab and other eastern horses. 
_ The color description, yellow dun with black fetlocks and stripes 
or fragments of stripes on back, legs, etc., at once called to my mind 
the west Norwegian pony, the so-called “ Fjordhest ”’ which is the 
predominant race of horse along the entire western coast of Norway, 
on the outer islands as well as in the fjord districts, while an entirely 
different horse, the “ Deelehest,” or Gudbrandsdal horse occupies 
exclusively the interior and eastern part of the country. The 
almost identical distribution of this fjord horse with that of the 
west Norway red deer suggested a similar origin, and consequently 
I began to gather material for a further study of the question. As 
usual, I found the literary record very defective. The various races 
or species of recent horses were either treated from the osteological 
standpoint alone or from their outward characters alone, such as 
form, color, size, etc. It was also a surprise to find that a character 
as important as the horny callosity, the so-called “ chestnut” on 
the hind legs which formerly has been held to be even of: generic 
importance in separating the genus Equus from Hippotigris and 
Asinus, the zebras and asses, has been overlooked by almost all au- 
thors. Nor did I find in the literature any indication to what extent 
