Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 5 (1901).djvu/67

Rh When taken young the Quagga could be readily tamed; it would also interbreed with the Horse. Sparrman, who visited the Cape towards the end of the eighteenth century, mentions that the first example of the species he met with was a sleek well-kept individual, very tame, and fond of being caressed by visitors. He also states that he saw a Quagga driven in the street harnessed with five Horses; and advocates the domestication of the animal, urging that it could at that time be more easily obtained than the Horse, that it would naturally eat the coarse grass of the country, and would probably be immune from the horse-sickness. About 1815 Lord Morton, with the praise-worthy desire to domesticate the species, obtained a Quagga stallion; but, being unable to procure a mate for the animal, bred from the Quagga and a mare of seven-eighths Arab blood a curious female hybrid of a dun or chestnut colour, faintly striped on neck and withers, the knees and hocks being also barred, Darwin also relates that Lord Mostyn bred a hybrid between a male Quagga and a chestnut mare. Sheriff Parkins' experiment, carried out some time previous to 1826, was of a more practical nature; and his two beautiful Quaggas (not a pair as often stated), harnessed to a phaeton, were frequently to be seen in Hyde Park and other fashionable places. Like other Society beauties, one of these Quaggas had his portrait painted; this work, by Agasse, still hangs in the Royal College of Surgeons, Lincoln's Inn Fields, where I have recently inspected it; and the woodcut illustrating the article "Quagga," by the late Sir W.H. Flower, in the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica,' is taken from this painting. Many years later Lieut.-Col, C. Hamilton Smith drove a Quagga in a gig. He seems to have been well pleased with it, and states that its mouth was fully as delicate as that of a Horse.

Let us now trace the history of the true Quagga from the sunny days of its prosperity to its decline and fall. For centuries it had thronged the veldt, its numbers unthinned by the hunter's rifle, and but little affected by the primitive weapons of the natives. When the Cape was opened up by the early settlers it gave way but slowly at first: we may note, however, that in 1820 Thomas Pringle, the South African poet, and the friend of Sir Walter Scott, observes that the Quaggas and Hartebeests had