the horse have expressed similar views on the color question. Hurst 

 holds that there is sufficient evidence to suggest that in certain 

 strains there may be a partial coupling of coat color and racing 

 power. It is instanced that the chestnut grand-children of the 

 famous St. Simon have proved themselves inferior in racing power 

 to their bay and brown brothers and sisters.^^ It is also interest- 

 ing to note that there is a strong tendency for the off -spring of 

 cross-breds to be chestnut. "In the case of Thoroughbreds," says 

 Bunsow, ' ' bays and browns may be either pure as regards the power 

 of transmitting their color to their off-spring or impure when they 

 may give rise to chestnuts.^* 



In the horse breeding of Arabia to-day the bays are easy favor- 

 ites and firsts. Blunt says that, "out of a hundred mares among 

 the Amezah one would see 35 bays, 30 greys, 15 chestnuts, and the 

 rest brown or black or two or three with white feet and a snipe or 

 blaze down the face ****** with very few exceptions all the 

 handsomest mares we saw were bay which is without doubt by far 

 the best color in Arabia, as it is in England. In choosing I should 

 take none but bays and if possible bays with black-points. ' '^"^ 



Had this description been of a high class South African stud 

 of horses it could not have been more true not even had he ex- 

 pounded on their merits and good qualities for I shall have oppor- 

 tunity to show that the Cape Horse in competition with his Arab 

 and Persian and even Thoroughbred brothers in a county foreign 

 to all of them easily held his own ; in fact quite outstripped them. 



With these remarks and by branching off into the field of re-, 

 search we return from the desert regions of North Africa to its sunny 

 south to trace there the distinctive characteristics of the Libyan 

 horse as exhibited in its descendents. I allude of course to the Cape 

 Horse which developed to great fame during the middle of the last 

 century. 



As will be shown in the further development of this chapter, 

 the first importations of horses to South Africa were from Java and 

 Persia. The descendents of these like the English Thoroughbred 

 show in a very marked degree that the most prominent inherited 

 qualities and characteristics were according to the best accounts, 

 those that characterized the Libyan race of North Africa. 



(13) C. C. Hurst "Eoyal Society of London." 1905. 



(14) E. Bunson ''The Mendel Journal No. 2, 1911. London- 



(15) Sir Wilfred S. Blunt "The Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates." 1905. 



11 



