Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 73.djvu/509

Rh doubt that such variations in color are found from district to district within a comparatively small area.

In addition to the two species of zebra already mentioned, there is the mountain zebra, formerly extremely common in the mountainous parts of Cape Colony and Natal, though now nearly extinct in that area. Its hind legs, as might naturally have been expected from its habitat, are more developed than those of the other zebras, just as these same limbs are also more developed in the kiang of the Himalayas than in any other ass.

With these facts before us, there can be no doubt that environment is a most potent factor not only in coloration, but also in osteology. No less certain is it that environment is capable of producing changes in animal types with great rapidity. Thus, although it is an historical fact that there were no horses in Java in 1346, and it is known that the ponies now there are descended from those brought in by the Arabs, yet within five centuries there has arisen a race of ponies (often striped) some of which are not more than two feet high. Darwin himself has given other examples of the rapid change in structure of horses when transferred from one environment to another, as, for instance, when Pampas horses are brought up into the Andes.

Another good example is that of the now familiar Basuto ponies. Up to 1846 the Basutos did not possess a single horse, those of them who went down and worked for the Boers of the Orange River usually taking their pay in cattle. At the date mentioned some of them began to take horses instead. These horses were of the ordinary mixed colonial kinds, and we may be sure that the Boers did not let the Basutos have picked specimens. The Basutos turned these horses out on their mountains, where, living under perfectly natural conditions, their posterity within less than forty years had settled down into a welldefined type of mountain pony.

Nor is it only in the horse family that we meet with examples of the force of environment. The tiger extends from the Indian Ocean, through China up to Corea, but the tiger of Corea is a very different animal from that of Bengal. Instead of the short hair of the Indian tiger the Corean has clothed himself with a robe of dense long fur to withstand the rigors of the north. It is not unlikely that if we had a sufficient number of skins from known localities we could trace the change in the tiger from latitude to latitude, just as I have shown in the case of the Equidæ.

Now whilst there is certainly a general physical type common to all the peoples round the Mediterranean, it by no means follows that all those peoples are from the same original stock. On the contrary, the analogy from man in other parts of the world, as well as that of the Eqnidæ, suggests that the resemblance between the Berbers, who speak