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Show 146 ON OLD PICTURES OF THE ZEBRA. [Mar. 7, is greatly to be desired. The passage from Dion Cassius (77. 6), riypir kcil 'nriri'jriypiv . . . tyovevfievovs ev to) decirpo), is quoted in Dindorf's ‘ Thesaurus,' and the word is thus rendered :- 11 Est major tigris species, similis onagro, ut ait anonymus, in cod. Augustano, cap. X ." Liddell & Scott looked upon the first element as qualitative-they seem to have thought that a hippotigris was a tiger as big as a horse, not a horse-like beast with tiger-like stripes. Camelopard and leopard, which have Greek forms, do not favour their definition. One would think that " hippotigris " must have occurred in Low Latin; it is not, however, entered in Ducange or Forcellini. One sentence in Ludolphus offers some difficulty: " Attamen caput equino aliquanto longius habent, quod hie vidi." It is not clear whether he saw a living animal or a picture. It is not impossible that a zebra may have been sent to Rome ; but Ludolphus probably refers to a picture. Aldrovandus (De Quadrup. i. 416) mentions " figura quae in libro Romse impresso patet," and it is certain that Father Tellez, S.J., sent home a picture of which one would like to know more. In 1678, apparently in reply to some inquiries, Ludolphus received a letter from Emanuel Nawendorf, a native of Altenburg, then resident in Batavia. He had seen two of these wild asses, brought by an Arab envoy from the Emperor of Abyssinia to the Governor of the Dutch East India Company. This personage utilised the royal gifts in a strange way. He sent them to the Emperor of Japan, getting in return ten thousand silver taels and thirty Japanese garments. Jean de Thevenot left Rome on his eastern journey in 1655, and after some stay in Constantinople went to Cairo, where he saw one of these zebras * :- " Au mois d'Octobre il arrive au Caire un ambassadeur d'Ethi-opie, qui avait plusieurs presents pour le Grand Seigneur, entre les autres, un ane qui avait une peau fort belle, pourvu qu'elle fut naturelle, car je n'en voudrais pas repondre, ne l'ayant point examinee ; cet ane avait le raye du dos noire, et tout le reste du corps etait bigarre de rayes blanches et rayes tannees alternative-ment, larges chacun d'un doigt, qui lui ceignaient tout le corps, sa tete etait extremement longue et bigarree comme le corps, les oreilles fort larges par en haut, commes celles d'un buffie, et noires, jaunes, et blanches, ses jambes bigarrees de meme que le corps, non pas en longue des jambes, mais a l'entour jusqu'au bas, en fagon de jarreti&re le tout avec tant d'ordre et de mesure qu'il n'y a point Alagia t si bien varie et proportion^, ni de peau de tigre on de leopard si belle. II mourut a cet ambassadeur deux anes * ‘ Relations d'un Voyage,' i. ch. lxviii. (Paris, 1664). f The only suggestion I can offer is that this word signifies some fabric with a regular pattern [from Turk. «% 'a = sp o tted , streaked]. The ‘ Century Dictionary ' has aladja, defined as " nearly the same as alatcha." Under this, one reads : " A cotton stuff made in Central Asia, dyed in the thread, and woven with white stripes on a blue ground." This has reference to E. Schuyler's " Turkestan." And in 1 La Grande Encyclopedie ' this entry occurs :- " Aladja (Comm.). Sorte de bourre de soie que l'on fabrique a Magn^sie, et qu'on emploie surtout pour les velours d'Orient." |