60 HORSES. ClIAp< u 



coexist on the different parts of the body : the legs may be 

 striped without any shoulder-stripe, or the converse case, which 

 is rarer, may occur ; but I have never heard of either shoulder or 

 leg-stripes without the spinal stripe. The latter is by far the 

 commonest of all the stripes, as might have been expected 

 as it characterises the other seven or eight species of the genus. 

 It is remarkable that so trifling a character as the shoulder- 

 stripe being double or triple should occur in such different 

 breeds as Welch and Devonshire ponies, the Shan pony, heavy 

 cart-horses, light South American horses, and the lanky Katty- 

 war breed. Colonel Hamilton Smith believes that one of his 

 five supposed primitive stocks was dun-coloured and striped ; 

 and that the stripes in all the other breeds result from ancient 

 crosses with this one primitive dun ; but it is extremely im- 

 provable that different breeds living in such distant quarters of 

 the world should all have been crossed with any one aboriginally 

 distinct stock. Nor have we any reason to believe that the effects 

 of a cross at a very remote period could be propagated for so 

 many generations as is implied on this view. 



With respect to the primitive colour of the horse having 

 been dun, Colonel Hamilton Smith 37 has collected a large 

 body of evidence showing that this tint was common in the 

 East as far back as the time of Alexander, and that the wild 

 horses of Western Asia and Eastern Europe now are, or recently 

 were, of various shades of dun. It seems that not very long ago 

 a wild breed of dun-coloured horses with a spinal stripe was pre- 

 served in the royal parks in Prussia. I hear from Hungary that 

 the inhabitants of that country look at the duns with a spinal 

 stripe as the aboriginal stock, and so it is in Norway. Dun- 

 coloured ponies are not rare in the mountainous parts of Devon- 

 shire, Wales, and Scotland, where the aboriginal breed would 

 have had the best chance of being preserved. In South America 

 in the time of Azara, when the horse had been feral for about 

 250 years, 90 out of 100 horses were " bai-chatains," and the 

 remaining ten were " zains," and not more than one in 2000 



3 7 ' Naturalist's Library,' vol. xii. in ancient times. See also Pallas's ac- 



(1841), pp. 109, 156 to 163, 280, 281. count of the wild horses of the East, 



Cream-colour, passing into Isabella {i. e. who speaks of dun and brown as the 



the colour of the dirty linen of Queen prevalent colours. 

 Isabella), seems to have been common 



