The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 6th EditionDarwin, Charles
History
The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 6th Edition
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; 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 might have thought that it was a hybrid 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 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.
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