lyo STUDIES IN THE EVOLUTION OF ANIMALS 



endeavoured to select them out. Yet it is only exceptionally that 

 they have succeeded in getting rid of them, for the large majority 

 of Horses of all kinds one sees in the streets of London have these 

 frontal marks, either fully developed or with vestiges of them ; so 

 that I think we would be right in concluding that they come from 

 a remote ancestry. 



' Our grandfathers have told us how their fathers expatiated on 

 the merits of the Dutch Horses (old Lincolnshire blacks), of their 

 size and feats of strength, how the blacks with white legs and 

 blazes were most esteemed. These animals, or their descendants, 

 in time became located all over England.' ^ 



This would appear a sufficient reason why blazed horses are so 

 common in the streets of London. They got it from the old Dutch 

 Horses, ' which with white legs and blazes were most esteemed' 



But this is not all, for Mr. F. Finn tells us ^ that ' The Onager 

 was put to an Abyssinian wild Ass, and produced a hybrid ; it 

 then bore, to a male Onager, a chestnut foal with a white blaze on 

 the forehead ; but as this foal thus resembled neither parent, and 

 in fact exhibited a Horse's rather than an Ass's marking, the case 

 is surely one of analogous variation.' 



The names of the equines appear to me to be mere verbal 

 distinctions used by systematists in classifying animals; In 

 nature there seems to be no such distinction between Horse, Ass, 

 Onager, Zebra, and Quagga, more especially as they all inter-hreed. 

 And this blaze on the forehead of the chestnut Onager's foal seems 

 a reversion to some ancestral mark — white or black — whether we 

 call the ancestor a Horse, an Ass, an Onager, or a Zebra. In this 

 foal the blaze was white, but I have shown that the blaze may have 

 originally been black, and caused by a fusion of the stripes on the 



' Pedigrees of British and American Horses,' by J. I. Lupton, Nineteenth Century, 

 June 1894, p. 926. 



^ ' Some facts of Telegony.' — Natural Science, December 1893, p. 437. 



