46 THE PEKYC01K EXPEEIMEN'l'S. 



The Hybrid "Nokette.' 



The most attractive of last summer's crop of lij^brids 

 has for its dam a good-lookiug eleven hands Shetland 

 pony ("Nora"). This pony, which will be six years old 

 in the spring, had a foal in 1895 to a small black Shetland 

 pony (" Wallace "). Nora is in many ways a small edition 

 of Mulatto, and her foal Norette may be said to be a small 

 edition of Romulus. When a few days old Norette, in 

 her colouring, movements, and make, was more fascinating 

 than Eomulus at a similar age; and now that she has 

 increased from thirty inches, (her height wdien foaled on 

 June Sth) to nearly forty-one inches she looks as if she 

 belonged to some bygone age. Norette has been from 

 the first more intelligent than any of her contemporaries, 

 and always very much on the alert without being at all 

 nervous or frio-htened. She followed her dam throua'h a 

 crowd of some thousands of people on Jubilee Day without 

 any hesitation or evincing any signs of fear, and she now 

 leads quietly and allows herself to be measured without 

 offering any resistance. At birth Norette generally 

 resembled Eomulus, both in colouring, markings, and 

 shape, but her head was relatively smaller, and the ears 

 relatively shorter. There was, however, a very important 

 and interesting difference between Norette and the other 

 hybrids. As already pointed out, the croup and rump of 

 Romulus were at the outset marked bj- numerous rows of 

 spots having on the whole a transverse direction. When 

 his new coat was completed, in August last, I noticed that 

 many of the spots had united to form somewhat zigzag 

 bands which in their direction agreed closely with the 

 stripes on the hind quarters of the Somali zebra. In 

 Norette, instead of spots over the hind quarters, there 

 were from the first numerous narrow and hardly at all 

 wavy stripes, which line for line almost agreed with the 

 markings in the Somali zebra. But further, many of 

 these all but transverse stripes reached, or all but reached, 



