468 Proceedings of Royal Society of Edinburgh. [sess. 
Others affirmed that they failed to discover any difference between 
the young wild horses in the London Zoological Gardens and Ice- 
land ponies of a like age. To test the first of these assertions, I, 
as already mentioned, mated the chestnut Mongol pony with a 
young Connemara stallion ; to test the second, I purchased last 
autumn a recently-imported yellow-dun Iceland mare in foal to 
an Iceland stallion. As I anticipated, the chestnut Mongol mare 
produced a foal the image of herself. This foal, it is hardly 
necessary to say, decidedly differs from the Prjevalsky colts 
recently imported from Central Asia by Mr Hagenbeck, and it as 
decidedly differs from the Kiang hybrids described above. 
The Iceland foal, notwithstanding the upright mane and the 
woolly coat, for a time of a nearly uniform white colour, could never 
be mistaken for a wild horse, and the older it gets the differences 
will become accentuated. 
If Prjevalsky’s horse is neither a Kiang-pony mule nor a feral 
Mongolian pony, and if moreover it is fertile (and its fertility 
can hardly be questioned), I fail to see how we can escape from 
the conclusion that it is as deserving as, say, the Kiang to be 
regarded as a distinct species. Granting Prjevalsky’s horse is a 
true wild horse, the question arises : In what way, if any, is it 
related to our domestic horses? It is still too soon to answer 
this question ; but I venture to think that should we by-and-by 
arrive at the conclusion that our domestic horses have had a 
multiple origin — have sprung from at least two perfectly distinct 
sources, — we shall probably subsequently come to the further 
conclusion that our big-headed, big-jointed horses, with well-marked 
chestnuts on the hind legs, are more intimately related to the 
wild horse than the small-headed, slender-limbed varieties without 
chestnuts on the hind legs ; that in fact the heavy horses found 
living in a semi- wild state and Prjevalsky’s horse have sprung 
from the same ancestors. 
[Note . — Towards the cost of the young Prjevalsky horse (without 
which this inquiry would have been difficult) the University con- 
tributed £100 from the Moray Research Fund.] 
{Issued separately August 8 , 1903 .) 
