on 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. I have myself recently bred a foal
from a bay mare (offspring of a Turkoman horse and a Flemish mare) by
a bay English race-horse. This foal, when a week old, was marked on its
hinder quarters and on its forehead with numerous very narrow, dark,
zebra-like bars, and its legs were feebly striped. All the stripes soon
disappeared completely. 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 are 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 this view may be safely rejected, for it is highly improbable
that the heavy Belgian cart-horse, Welsh ponies, Norwegian cobs, the
lanky Kattywar race, etc., inhabiting the most distant parts of the
world, should have all have been crossed with one supposed aboriginal
stock.

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; according to Mr. Gosse,
in certain parts of the United States, about nine out of ten mules have
striped legs. I once saw a mule with its legs so much striped that any
one might have thought that it was a hybrid 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 Morton's famous hybrid, from a chestnut mare and male quagga, the
hybrid and even the pure offspring subsequently produced from the same
mare by a black Arabian sire, were much more p