ng foal which was
narrowly striped over nearly all its body, there was no doubt about the
the early and complete disappearance of the stripes. Mr. W. W. Edwards
examined for me twenty-two foals of race-horses, and twelve had the
spinal stripe more or less plain; this fact, and some other accounts
which I have received, lead me to believe that the spinal stripe often
disappears in the English race-horse when old. On the whole I infer
that the stripes are generally plainest in the foal, and tend to
disappear in old age.

The stripes are variable in colour, but are always darker than the rest of
the body. They do not by any means always {60} coexist on the different
parts of the body: the legs may be striped without any shoulder-stripe, or
the converse case, which is rarer, may occur; but I have never heard of
either shoulder or leg-stripes without the spinal stripe. The latter is by
far the commonest of all the stripes, as might have been expected, as it
characterises the other seven or eight species of the genus. It is
remarkable that so trifling a character as the shoulder-stripe being double
or triple should occur in such different breeds as Welch and Devonshire
ponies, the Shan pony, heavy cart-horses, light South American horses, and
the lanky Kattywar breed. Colonel Hamilton Smith believes that one of his
five supposed primitive stocks was dun-coloured and striped; and that the
stripes in all the other breeds result from ancient crosses with this one
primitive dun; but it is extremely improbable that different breeds living
in such distant quarters of the world should all have been crossed with any
one aboriginally distinct stock. Nor have we any reason to believe that the
effects of a cross at a very remote period could be propagated for so many
generations as is implied on this view.

With respect to the primitive colour of the horse having been dun, Colonel
Hamilton Smith[136] has collected a large body of evidence showing that
this tint was common in the East as far back as the time of Alexander, and
that the wild horses of Western Asia and Eastern Europe now are, or
recently were, of various shades of dun. It seems that not very long ago a
wild breed of dun-coloured horses with a spinal stripe was preserved in the
royal parks in Prussia. I hear from Hungary that the inhabitants of that
country look at the duns with a spinal stripe as the aboriginal stock, and
so it is in Norway.