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 plainly barred across the legs than is even
the pure quagga. Lastly, and this is another most remarkable case, a
hybrid has been figured by Dr. Gray (and he informs me that he knows of a
second case) from the ass and the hemionus; and this hybrid, though the ass
only occasionally has stripes on his legs and the hemionus has none and has
not even a shoulder-stripe, nevertheless had all four legs barred, and had
three short shoulder-stripes, like those on the dun Devonshire and Welsh
ponies, and even had some zebra-like stripes on the sides of its face.
With respect to this last fact, I was so convinced that not even a stripe
of colour appears from what is commonly called chance, that I was led
solely from the occurrence of the face-stripes on this hybrid from the ass
and hemionus to ask Colonel Poole whether such face-stripes ever occurred
in the eminently striped Kattywar breed of horses, and was, as we have
seen, answered in the affirmative.
What now are we to say to these several facts? We see several distinct
species of the horse genus becoming, by simple variation, striped on the
legs like a zebra, or striped on the shoulders like an ass. In the horse
we see this tendency strong whenever a dun tint appears--a tint which
approaches to that of the general colouring of the other species of the
genus.
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