300 Messrs Marshall and Annandale, 



In a paper recently communicated to the Royal Society of 

 Edinburgh and abstracted in Nature (vol. lxvii., 1903, p. 239), 

 Professor Ewart has given an account of a 'new horse' from 

 the Hebrides and the north of Ireland which he has provisionally 

 named Equus caballus celticus. He described it as being a small- 

 headed pony, with prominent eyes, small ears, slender limbs, small 

 joints and narrow hoofs, and with short hairs in the upper part of 

 the tail, as in mules. Moreover — and this was possibly the most 

 important characteristic— there were no callosities on the hind 

 limbs. The ' Celtic pony,' as thus described, was found to occur 

 in Barra, Tiree and other of the Hebrides, as well as in Connemara, 

 while the majority of the ponies imported into this country from 

 Iceland and the Faroes were observed to possess the same 

 characteristics. 



Equus caballus celticus, then, is very distinct from the large- 

 headed, thick -jointed • Mongol 1 ponies, and also from those of 

 Norway, both of these having well-marked bock-callosities, and 

 belonging to what has been called the 'cart-horse type,' in spite 

 of their comparatively small size. It is to this type, according to 

 Professor Ewart (8), that Pijevalsky's horse is most closely related. 



Professor Ewart suggested further that the two types of horse 

 (the ' Celtic pony ' and the ' cart-horse ' types) were the present- 

 day representatives of two distinct species or varieties of the 

 genus Equus, which are believed, partly on archaeological and partly 

 on palaeontological grounds, to have existed together in Europe in 

 the Palaeolithic period. From these two forms all the domestic 

 breeds of the present day, in Asia and Africa, as well as in 

 Europe, may be supposed to be descended, the proportions of ad- 

 mixture being different in different breeds. Professor Ridge way (9), 

 however, in a paper read before this Society, has adduced a 

 considerable amount of evidence in support of the view that all 

 the fine horses of the world are derived from the Barb, which he 

 suggested might have had an independent origin. 



We have already mentioned that the ponies of Iceland and 

 the Faroes have in recent years undergone improvement by the 

 admixture of Norwegian blood. In the case of the Faroes the 

 Norwegian stallions have only been introduced, apparently, within 

 the last ten or twelve years, and in spite of this admixture, of 

 which it does not appear that Professor Ewart was aware, the 

 general characters of the majority of the Faroe and of the 

 Icelandic ponies are those of the ' Celtic ' type. This was made 

 evident by an examination of a number of Faroe ponies in 



1 The similarity between the Norwegian and the Mongol ponies is an additional 

 argument in favour of the theory that there is a Mongolian element, possibly derived 

 from Central Asia, in the population of North- Western Europe. (MacBitchie, Man, 

 1903, No. 97, p. [171].) 



