INTERESTING FEATURES IN HORSES, ETC. 179 



It is very curious that the wild cattle of Cadzow Park ^ should 

 have black muzzles, ears, and front parts of hands and feet, while 

 the rest of their body is white. It would seem that those parts 

 had originally a specially different function from the rest of the 

 body, which is now of a contrasted colour, while in the Gaur the 

 body is black, the muzzle pale, and the hands and feet white. 



Then in the same work^ it is stated of the wild cattle of 

 the Somerford Park breed, that ' the colour is pure white ; the 

 ears, rims of the eyes, muzzle, and hoofs being quite black. Like 

 all other herds of the forest breed they have a tendency to pro- 

 duce black spots on the neck, sides and legs.' 



Surely this contrast of certain parts with the general coloration, 

 and this tendency to produce spots, cannot be the result of pure 

 accident. It seems that in the nerve-centres the 'memory' of 

 ancestral dermal conditions is now aroused, and now in abey- 

 ance, and so the results on the skin are now ancestral, and now 

 aberrant. 



In speculating on the causes of these interesting phenomena, 

 we should not be led away by the bias of a theory, and shut our 

 eyes to any side-lights that may turn up in the course of our 

 research. I shall therefore put on record the following fact, so 

 that the reader may make of it what he can. 



In the Tring Museum there is a fine specimen of Chapman's 

 Zebra. It has the lower parts of its limbs for several inches above 

 the hoofs wholly black ; while Grevy's Zebra close by has those 

 same parts fully striped. It would appear that the black of the 

 former may be a fusion of the stripes of the latter; but at the 

 same time it would show that there was a difference of innervation 

 there, which caused this fusion. 



Among the extinct Ganoid fishes there were several species 

 ' See Royal Natural History, vol. ii. p. 164. ^ Ibid. p. 167. 



