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Show 60 TIORSES. CHAP. ll. coexist on the different parts of the body: the logs may .be 1.1 t · th converse case, whiCh striped without any shou uor-s npe, or 0 . 1 ·d of either shou 1c1 er or is rarer may occur · but I have never 1ear . ' ' · · n1h 1 ttor IS by far the leg-stripes without tho spmal stnpe. ..L e a 1 commonest of all the stripes, as might have boon 1 oxpectec' as it characterises the other seven or eight species of t le g~~us. It is remarkable that so trifling a character as the sh?u orstripe beino- double or triple should occur in such different breeds as vVolch and Devonshire ponies, the Shan pony, heavy cart-horses, light South American b?rses, ~nd the lanky" Katt~wai · breed. Colonel Hamilton Smith beheves that one ~f his five supposed primitive stocks was dun-coloured ~nd stnp~d; and that tho stripes in all the other breeds. re~ult from anc1~nt crosses with this one primitive dun; but It .Is extremely rm-. . b bl th t different breeds living in such distant quarters of pro a e a b · · 11 the world should aU have been crossed with any one a ong1~a y distinct stock Nor have we any reason to believe that the effects of a cross at a very remote period could be propagated for so many generations as is implied on this view. . ·with respect to the primitive colour of the horse havmg been dun, Colonel Hamilton Smith 37 has collected a large body of evidence showing that this tint was common in t?e East as far back as the time of Alexander, and that the w1ld horses of Western Asia and Eastern Europe now are, or recently wore of various shades of dun. It seems that not very long ago a wiid breed of dun-coloured horses with a spinal stripe was preserved in the royal parks in Prussia. I hear f]:om Hungary that the inhabitants of that country look at the duns with a spinal stripe as the aboriginal stock, and so it is in Norway. Duncoloured ponies are not rare in the mountainous parts of Devonshire, vVales, and Scotland, where the aboriginal breed would have had the best chance of being preserved. In South America in the time of Azara, when the horse bad been feral for about 250 years, 90 out of 100 horses were " bai-cbatains," and the remaining ten were "zains," and not more than one in 2000 37 •Naturalist's Library,' vol. xii. (1841), pp. 109, 15G io 163, 280, 281. Cream-colour, passing into Isabella (i.e. the colour of ihc dirty linen of Queen Isabella), seems to have been common in ancient times. See also Pallas's account of the wild horses of tbc East, who speaks of dun and brown as the prevalent colours. CHAP. II. TIIEIR COLOURS AND STRIPES. 61 black. Zain is generally translated as dark without any white ; but as Azara speaks of mules being "zain-clair," I suspect that zain must have meant dun-coloured. In some parts of the world feral horses show a strong tendency to become roans.3s In the following chapters on the Pigeon we shall see that in pure breeds of .various colours, when a blue bird is occasionally pr?duced, c~rtam black marks invariably appear on the wings and tad ; so agam, when variously coloured broods. are crossed blue birds ':ith the same black marks are frequently produced.' vVe shall furt~10r see. that these facts are explained by, and afford strong evidence m favour of, the view that all the breeds are descended from the rock-pigeon, or Columba livia, which is thus coloure~ and marked. But the appearance of the stripes on the vanous breeds of the horse, when of a dun-colour, does not a~or~ .nearly such ~ood evidence of their descent from a single primitive stock as m the case of the pigeon ; because no certainly ':ild horse is known as a standard of comparison; because the stnpes w~en they do appear are variable in character; because t~ere IS far from sufficient evidence of the appearance of the stnpes from the crossing of distinct breeds; and lastly, because all the species of the genus Equus have the spinal stripe, and several have shoulder and leg stripes. Nevertheless the similarit! in tl~e most . distinct breeds in their general range of colon~·, m. their dapplmg, and in the occasional appearance, es~eCially m duns, of leg-stripes and of double or triple shoulderstnpes, taken together, indicate the probability of the descent of all the existing races from a single, dun-coloured, more or less striped, primitive stock, to which our horses still occasionally revert. 38 Azara, ' Quadrupcdes du Para- . guay,' tom. ii. p. 307; for the colour of mules, see p. 350. In North America Catlin (vol. ii. p. 57) describes the wild horses, believed to have descended from the Spanish horses of Mexico, as of all colours, black, grey, roan, and roan pied with sorrel. F. Michaux (' Travels in North America,' Eng. translat., p. 235) describes two wild horses from Mexico as roan. In the Falkland Islands, where the horse has been feral only between 60 and 70 years, I was told that roans and iron-greys were the prevalent colours. These several facts show that horses do not generally revert to any uniform colour. |