r 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 racehorse 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 {165} 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, &c., 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: 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 would at
first 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