THE TBUE QUAGGA. 43 



When taken young the Quagga could be readily tamed ; it 

 would also interbreed with the Horse. Sparrman, who visited 

 the Cape towards the end of the eighteenth century, mentions 

 that the first example of the species he met with was a sleek 

 well-kept individual, very tame, and fond of being caressed by 

 visitors. He also states that he saw a Quagga driven in the 

 street harnessed with five Horses ; and advocates the domesti- 

 cation of the animal, urging that it could at that time be more 

 easily obtained than the Horse, that it would naturally eat the 

 coarse grass of the country, and would probably be immune from 

 the horse-sickness. About 1815 Lord Morton, with the praise- 

 worthy desire to domesticate the species, obtained a Quagga 

 stallion ; but, being unable to procure a mate for the animal, 

 bred from the Quagga and a mare of seven-eighths Arab blood a 

 curious female hybrid of a dun or chestnut colour, faintly striped 

 on neck and withers, the knees and hocks being also barred, 

 Darwin also relates that Lord Mostyn bred a hybrid between a 

 male Quagga and a chestnut mare. Sheriff Parkins' experiment, 

 carried out some time previous to 182G, was of a more practical 

 nature ; and his two beautiful Quaggas (not a pair as often 

 stated), harnessed to a phaeton, were frequently to be seen in 

 Hyde Park and other fashionable places. Like other Society 

 beauties, one of these Quaggas had his portrait painted ; this 

 work, by Agasse, still hangs in the Royal College of Surgeons, 

 Lincoln's Inn Fields, where I have recently inspected it; and 

 the woodcut illustrating the article "Quagga," by the late Sir W. 

 H. Flower, in the 'Encyclopsedia Britannica,' is taken from this 

 painting. Many j'ears later Lieut.-Col, C, Hamilton Smith drove 

 a Quagga in a gig. He seems to have been well pleased with 

 it, and states that its mouth was fully as delicate as that of 

 a Horse. 



Let us now trace the history of the true Quagga from the 

 sunn}' days of its prosperity to its decline and fall. For centuries 

 it had thronged the veldt, its numbers unthinned by the hunter's 

 rifle, and but little affected by the primitive weapons of the 

 natives. When the Cape was opened up by the early settlers it 

 gave way but slowly at first : we may note, however, that in 1820 

 Thomas Pringle, the South African poet, and the friend of Sir 

 Walter Scott, observes that the Quaggas and Hartebeests had 



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