The Horse in Iceland and the Faroes. 301 



Thorshavn this summer, for out of eleven individuals only one 

 had large hock callosities, and this animal, though of small size, 

 differed from the others in being exceptionally clumsy in build, 

 with a large head strongly suggestive of a cart-horse. The 

 remaining ten ponies either had the hock callosities much reduced 

 in size, or, as in the case of two individuals, had no hock callosities. 

 The height of these ponies varied from about eleven to about 

 thirteen hands. A number of Icelandic ponies, averaging about 

 thirteen hands high, were seen on board ship on their way from 

 Reykjavik to Denmark, and of these six were examined and found 

 to have no hock callosities ; while another, which had been im- 

 ported into the Faroes, had the same peculiarity. 



About a dozen Faroe ponies have very recently been imported 

 into this country, and of these fully one-third have no hock callo- 

 sities, while the others have them very small. All these ponies 

 were characterized by having short hairs in the upper part of the 

 tail 1 . They were inferior in quality to, and somewhat smaller 

 than, several of those we saw in Thorshavn. Of two Icelandic 

 ponies, also recently arrived in Scotland, the hock callosities are 

 absent in one and reduced in the other, while the tail characters 

 are similar to those of the Faroe ponies. 



The plate represents a Faroe pony, which (though evidently 

 belonging to a better type 2 ) closely resembles, so a native of 

 the islands assured us, the animals which existed in the Faroes 

 before the recent introduction of Norwegian blood. In this 

 animal the ' Celtic ' characters strongly predominate, the shorter 

 hairs in the upper part of the tail being especially noteworthy, 

 as this character is occasionally absent in the Norwegian cross- 

 breeds. 



In spite of what has been said above, we do not mean to assert 

 that the ideal ' Celtic ' type, absolutely pure-bred, ever existed in 

 Iceland or the Faroes, for it is probably many thousand years since 

 either this type or that represented by the cart-horse lived as a 

 distinct form, and, as we have seen, the ancestors of the Icelandic 

 and Faroe breeds did not come only from small islands, where it 

 was possible that one of these two forms had been isolated, but 

 also from Scandinavia proper, and it is only reasonable to con- 

 jecture that rovers like the Norse vikings brought home with 

 them, to Scandinavia or to Iceland, horses from many different 



1 The presence of short hairs in the upper part of the tail is a character 

 frequently present in Welsh and other ponies which are said invariably to have 

 hock callosities. Such ponies, also, may be regarded as representing traces of the 

 primitive short-headed variety of horse {vide postea), but as belonging to breeds 

 which, owing to frequent intercrossing with the large-headed strains, have not 

 maintained nearly the same constancy of type as the comparatively isolated 

 Hebridean, Faroe and Icelandic ponies have done. 



2 Compare the photograph reproduced by Bruun, t. c. 



VOL. XII. PT. IV. 20 



