colours; transverse bars on the legs are not rare in duns, mouse-duns,
and in one instance in a chestnut: a faint shoulder-stripe may
sometimes be seen in duns, and I have seen a trace in a
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-stripes; 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 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
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