



■OilAP. V- 



Analogous Variations. 129 



Eastern China; and from Norway in the north to the Malay Archi- 

 Xo n fte south. In all parts of the world these stripes occur 

 ? oC.st in dnns and mouse-duns ; by the term dun a large range 

 rf colour is included, from one between brown and black to a close 

 annroach to cream-colour. . 



] I am aware that Colonel Hamilton Smith, who has written on 

 this subject, believes that the several breeds of the horse are 

 -descended from several aborigiual species-one of which, the dun, 

 was striped; and that the above-described appearances are all due 

 to ancient crosses with the dun stock. But this view may be safely 

 rejected; for it is highly improbable that the heavy Belgian cart- 

 horse, Welsh ponies, Norwegian cobs, the lanky Kattywar race, &c, 

 inhabiting the most distant parts of the world, should all have 

 been crossed with one supposed aboriginal stock. 



Now let us turn to the effects of crossing the several species of 

 the horse-genus. Rollin asserts, that the common mule from the 

 ,ass and horse is particularly apt to have bars on its legs ; accord- 

 ing to Mr. Gosse, in certain parts of the United States about nine 

 out of ten mules have striped legs. I once saw a mule with its 

 legs so much striped that any one might have thought that it was 

 a hybrid-zebra ; and Mr. W. C. Martin, in his excellent treatise on 

 the horse, has given a figure of a similar mule. In four coloured 

 drawings, which I have seen, of hybrids between the ass and zebra, 

 the legs were much more plainly barred than the rest of the body ; 

 and in one of them there was a double shoulder-stripe. In Lord 

 Morton's famous hybrid from a chestnut mare and male quagga, 

 the hybrid, and even the pure offspring subsequently produced 

 from the same mare by a black Arabian sire, were much more 

 plainly barred across the legs than is even the pure quagga. 

 Lastly, and this is another most remarkable case, a hybrid has been 

 figured by Dr. Gray (and he informs me that he knows of a second 

 case) from the ass and the hemionus ; and this hybrid, though the 

 ass only occasionally has stripes on his legs and the hemionus has 

 none and has not even a shoulder-stripe, nevertheless had all four 

 legs barred, and had three short shoulder-stripes, like those on the 

 dun Devonshire and Welsh ponies, and even had some zebra-like 

 stripes on the sides of its face. With respect to this last fact, I was 

 so convinced that not even a stripe of colour appears from what is 

 commonly called chance, that I was led solely from the occurrence 

 01 me ace-stripes on this hybrid from the ass and hemionus to ask 

 Loionel looie whether such face-stripes ever occurred in the emi- 

 nently striped Kattywar breed of horses, and was, as we have seen, 

 -an*\\ ered m the affirmative. 



