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Show 164 LAWS OF VARIATION. CHAP. v. bay horse. My son made a careful examination and sketch for me of a dun Belgian cart-horse with a double stripe on each shoulder and with leg-strip~s; and a man, whom I can implicitly trust, has examined for me a small dun Welch pony with three short parallel stripes on each shoulder. In the north-west part of India the Kattywar breed of horses is so generally striped, that, as I hear from Colonel Poole, who examined the breed for the Indian Government, a horse without stripes is not considered as purely-bred. The spine is always striped; the legs are generally barred; and the shoulder-stripe, which is sometimes double and sometimes treble, is common ; the side of the face, moreover, is sometimes striped. The stripes are plainest in the foal; and sometimes quite disappear in old horses. Colonel Poole has seen both gray and bay Kattywar horses striped when first foaled. I have, also, reason to suspect, from information given me by Mr. W. W. Edwards, that with the English racehorse the spinal stripe is much commoner in the foal than in the full-grown animal. Without here entering on further details, I may state that I have collected cases of leg and shoulder stripes in horses of very different breeds, in various countries from Britain to Eastern China; and from Norway in the north to the Malay Archipelago in the south. In all parts of the world these stripes occur far oftenest in duns and mouse-duns; by the term dun a large range of colour is included, from one between brown and black to a close approach to cream-colour. I am aware that Colonel Hamilton Smith, who has written on this subject, believes that the several breeds of the horse have descended from several aboriginal species-one of which, the dun, was striped; and that the above-described appearances are all due to ancient CHAP. V. LAWS OF VARIATION. 165 crosses with the dun stock. But I am not at all satisfied with this theory, and should be loth to apply it to breeds so distinct as the heavy Belgian cart-horse, Welch ponies, cobs, the lanky Kattywar race, &c., inhabiting the most distant parts of the world. N ?w 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. I once saw a mule with its legs so much striped that any one at first would have thought that it must have been the product of a 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 bet~een 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 Moreton's famous hybrid from a chestnut mare and male quagga, the hybrid, and even the pure offspring subs~ quently produced from the mare by a black Arabian ~Ire, 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, thou~h the ass seldom has stripes on its legs and the hemwnus has none and has not even a shoulder-stripe nevertheless had all four legs barred, and had thre~ short shoulder-stripes, like those on the dun Welch p_ony, an~ 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 col~ur ~ppears from what would commonly be called an acci-ent, t~at I was led solely from the occurrence of the face-stripes on this hybrid from the ass and hemionus ' |