On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection: Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for LifeDarwin, Charles
Science
On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection: Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life
Darwin, Charles
Evolution (Biology); Natural selection
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. I once saw a mule
with its legs so much striped that any one at first would 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 a double shoulder-stripe. In
Lord Moreton’s famous hybrid from a chestnut mare and male quagga, the
hybrid, and even the pure offspring subsequently produced from the 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 seldom has stripes on its 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 Welch pony, 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 would commonly be
called an accident, 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 occur in the
eminently striped Kattywar breed of horses, and was, as we have seen,
answered in the affirmative.
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