reed 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 race-horse 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 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, etc., inhabiting the most
distant parts of the world.
Now 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 between 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 subsequently produced from the mare
by a black Arabian sire, were much mo
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