IMMEDIATE ANCESTORS OF THE HORSE. 299 



Immediate Ancestors of the Horse.— The type of 

 horse immediately preceding the present one, is a subject 

 which I approach with a great deal of diffidence ; as I have 

 not had an opportunity of studying it carefully, much as I 

 would have wished to have done so. Darwin, very justly as 

 it seems to me, points to the probability that all the existing 

 races of horses have descended from ''a single dun-coloured, 

 more or less striped primitive stock, to which our horses occa- 

 sionally revert." This primitive stock, I would conjecture, 

 closely resembled the quagga or Burchells zebra. The not 

 uncommon appearance in horses of dark stripes on the fore 

 arms, and a dark stripe along the back and across the shoulders, 

 seems to be cases of reversion to the likeness of an ancestor, 

 especially as these markings, when they do occur, show much 

 clearer in early youth than when the animal grows older. Not 

 alone in this respect does the horse take on the markings of 

 the ass ; but his coat not infrequently assumes a near approach 

 to the colour of the ass, with white under the belly, insides of 

 the legs, etc. The ass, on the contrary, never clothes himself 

 in the bays, chestnuts, roans and greys which are greatly 

 affected by the horse ; and is practically free from the irregular 

 markings so freely indulged in by his relative. ** Stars/' 

 *' blazes," '"reaches," *'snips/' ''stockings," and coats, piebald 

 and skewbald, can hardly be the unbiassed result of domestica- 

 tion ; for the ass appears to have been the companion of man 

 even longer than the horse, and he shows little or no tendency 

 to adopt such motley wear. The apparently functionless false 

 nostril of the horse is of lesser depth than that of the ass, and 

 may be expected to disappear in the course of ages. I would 

 therefore infer that the immediate ancestor of the horse, as we 

 know him, was a more or less striped ass. From the drawings 

 made on pieces of bone and horn by the cave men of Southern 

 France, it would seem that the horse of Western Europe, say, 

 ten thousand years ago, was a small, rough, thick-set animal 

 rather like the Mongolian pony. The instinct this and other 

 horses have of scraping away with their fore feet snow when 

 it covers the ground, so as to get at the underlying grass, would, 



