30 Proceedings of Royal Society of Edinburgh. [sess. 
of dark - coloured horses, which, like those mentioned in the 
Icelandic sagas, Professor Ridgeway regards as affording evidence 
of the importation of Libyan blood. He considers also that the 
existence of striped dun ponies points similarly to the conclusion 
that such an importation had occurred. The first of these con- 
clusions appears to me to be an extremely probable one, but, a& 
we have seen, black horses were very rare until far down into' 
the eighteenth century, so that it is unlikely that the infusion 
of dark Libyan blood had been at all considerable, and I cannot 
agree with Mr Ridgeway in the view that the striped dun ponies 
show any evidence of having had a Libyan origin. 
There can be little doubt that the two types of horses which 
occur in Iceland at the present day are derived respectively from 
the ancestors of the original fjord horse and from those of the 
unaltered Gudbrandsdal horse. One of the commonest and most 
typical colours among existing Icelandic horses is light dun with 
a dorsal stripe. I have searched the “ Landn&mabdc ” or record 
of the Viking settlements in Iceland.* and although there are 
numerous references to the importation of horses and other 
domestic animals, I can only find one to a horse’s colour. This 
is a reference to a stallion which was “apal-gr&r,” which is, I 
suppose, a shade of dun. But, as the saga of “Burnt Hjal” 
shows, horses of other colours than dun existed in Iceland in 
the tenth century, and practically all colours are represented 
there at the present time, though light dun is probably still the 
most frequent. 
Professor Ridgeway, in his recent work, has shown that there is 
Libyan blood in the ponies of the Hebrides and the north of Ireland, 
while in a paper published two years ago on the “ Horse in Iceland 
and the Faroes,” Mr Helson Annandale and I have pointed out that 
a large proportion of the Horse colonists in those islands had been 
living in the Hebrides or Ireland before they removed to the 
islands further north, and that it is thus extremely probable 
that the horses of the Faroes and Iceland are derived partly from 
the British Isles. So that it is not unlikely that the Icelandic 
and Faroe ponies have received infusions of Libyan blood through 
the importation of animals from the Hebrides and Ireland. In 
* See Yigfusson and York Powell, Origines Islandicce. 
