32 THE INFANCY OF ANIMALS 



striped, the cow not at all. Among certain breeds of 

 ponies, as among the Norwegian and Indian Kathiawar 

 races, more or less markedly striped animals make their 

 appearance with considerable frequency. In a young Nor- 

 wegian pony curiously zebra-like stripes have been observed 

 on the forehead, and in the Kathiawar ponies stripes com- 

 monly occur on the legs in addition to a stripe down the 

 back and across the shoulders. So that in the case of the 

 Eland calf and these ponies we may see the evolution of 

 a new livery — the gradual suppression of the stripes and 

 the formation of a " self-coloured " coat. Sooner or 

 later, it may be ages hence, the young eland wiU cease to 

 be striped — if the stripes have ceased to serve any useful 

 purpose — and these ponies will have lost the last witness 

 of their sometime zebra-like markings. 



Young whose hides are spotted must now come under 

 survey. Among both longitudinally and transversely 

 striped species, it should be remarked, are some in which 

 the stripes on the one hand are white against a dark grey, 

 blackish, or rufous background, as the case may be ; and 

 on the other black, or nearly so, set off against a lighter 

 background. And so it is with the spotted types : we 

 have white-spotted deer and black-spotted leopards, for 

 example. Whether these positive and negative types of 

 spots represent liveries of equal antiquity, or are divergent 

 modes of expressing the same theme, are questions which 

 naturally suggest themselves, but the answer thereto has 

 yet to be discovered ! 



If one might hazard a guess, one would, I thiiik, feel 

 inclined to regard the white-spotted as the more ancient 

 type. However, be that as it may, there seems but little 

 room for doubt that spots are less ancient than stripes, 

 if only from the fact that in a large number of cases at 



