Wilson — The Inheritance of the Dun Coat- Colour in Horses. 189 



the qtiagga. One of the two colts had its neck and some other parts of its 

 body plainly marked with stripes. Stripes on the body, not to mention 

 those on the legs, and the dun-colour, are extremely rare."^ 



However, if Darwin thought the colts — both the colts — to be more dun 

 than Lord Morton's description warranted, some later writers have gone 

 much farther and called them dun altogether. Yet if we are to judge by 

 their portraits, painted by Agasse — " the accurate Agasse," as Hamilton 

 Smith called him — and now in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons 

 in London, they were not dun at all, but just such ordinary bays, excepting 

 for the extraordinary striping, as might be met with anywhere. 



It is also doubtful whether the " black Arabian " was not a very dark 

 brown. 



Before discussing the data collected concerning duns, we may first 

 refer to some of the diiBculties connected with the question of colour, 

 the most serious of which is the error of description. This applies to all 

 colours, but most of all, perhaps, to grey, since grey horses are not usually 

 born so, and their true colour is not disclosed until one at least, and frequently 

 several, coats have been cast. Other colours may be misdescribed by the 

 describer not knowing them well enough ; but, in some cases, those who 

 liave a good knowledge of coat-colours may call one colour by another's 

 name when the shade of the one approximates to a shade of the other. 

 Secondary markings help to mark some colours, as, for instance, the lack of 

 black " points " in chestnuts and their presence usually, together with 

 frequent lighter-coloured muzzle-patches, in bays and browns. But these 

 distinguishing marks are not so well known as miglit be desired, and 

 misdescriptions result in consequence. 



As yet no clear distinguishing mark has been found to separate bay 

 and brown ; and so these colours are frequently confused. And, since the 

 muzzle-patcli, though frequent, is not constant in bays, dun, which has 

 not got it, runs some risk of being called bay, and bay of being called 

 dun, when the shade of the one approximates to a shade of the other. Dun 

 also is liable to be called chestnut ; an example being found in Low's 

 " Breeds of the Domestic Animals of the British Islands," in which the 

 Connemara breed of horse is represented pictorially by a dun, but is 

 described as " generally of the prevailing chestnut colour of the Andalusian 

 horses."^ 



' "Animals and Plants under Domestication," i, p. 403. 



- Low repeats the same description in his "Domesticated Animals of the British Islands," 1845, 

 p. 523. 



