INTERESTING FEATURES IN HORSES, ETC. 173 



Some one might say that intermixture would eventually have 

 produced an average structure, and all differences would be sup- 

 pressed. But this does not appear likely in all cases, for we know 

 that six-fingered people, although diluted with normal blood, have 

 rather strengthened than suppressed the monstrosity. 



Such intermixtures are not at all imaginary, for we know that 

 the Pheasant will procreate with the common fowl, and different 

 species of Pheasants will interbreed. And among plants, species 

 so distinct anatomically as a Lcelia and a Sophronitis, a Cereus and 

 Phyllocactus, and a Gesnera and a Gloxinia, have been successfully 

 mated.^ 



The application of all this to the Horse is that in our modern 

 Florse we may have not impossibly the convergence of, not only two 

 distinct races of Rhinoceros — the one and the two horned ; but 

 possibly also an intermixture of blood derived from some ancestor 

 of the Giraffe, and also of other ruminants,^ when they were not 

 so differentiated as they are now. 



If the reader should carry away the notion that I consider there 

 were once Horses with horns between their eyes and on their noses, 

 he will carry away a very wrong idea of what I mean. 



The Horse is a very specialised recent elaboration, as his feet 

 testify, from some remote and more generalised form, which was 

 the raw material out of which various kinds of mammals, such as 

 Giraffes, and other ruminants. Rhinoceroses and Horses have been 

 evolved. Horses or Horse-like animals may never have had horns 

 homologous with those of the Rhinoceros, but their ancestors may 

 have had them, and in the existing Horse, all that there is to tell 

 the tale of ancestral mesial horns may not impossibly be these 



1 At the meeting of the Royal Horticultural Society on the 8th May 1894, Messrs. Veitch 

 and Son showed a hybrid ( Gloxinia ' Brilliant ') between a Gesnera and a Gloxinia. 



^ In the tuft of long hair over the nose of the white-tailed Gnu, we may have the 

 dissociated hairs of which the Rhinoceros horn is said to be made up. 



