Arab families, is well known, but bears repetition.  I quote from Spencer Borden, The Arab Horse, p. 44:  “It is related that a certain Sheik was flying from an enemy, mounted on his favourite mare.  Arab warriors trust themselves only to mares, they will not ride a stallion in war.  The said mare was at the time far along toward parturition:  indeed she became a mother when the flying horseman stopped for rest at noonday, the new comer being a filly.  Being hard pressed the Sheik was compelled to remount his mare and again seek safety in flight, abandoning the newborn filly to her fate.  Finally reaching safety among his own people, great was the surprise of all when, shortly after the arrival of the Sheik on his faithful mare, the little filly less than a day old came into camp also, having followed her mother across miles of desert.  She was immediately given into the care of an old woman of the tribe (Ajuz = an old woman), hence her name Keheilet Ajuz, ’the mare of the old woman,’ and grew to be the most famous of all the animals in the history of the breed.”]

[Footnote 140:  Varro does not describe the livery of the horses of his day, as he does of cattle, but Virgil (Georg.  III, 81) supplies the deficiency, asserting that the best horses were bay (spadices) and roan (glauci) while the least esteemed were white (albi) and dun (gilvi), which is very interesting testimony in support of the most recent theory of the origin of the thoroughbred horse.  Professor Ridgeway who, opposing Darwin’s conclusion, contends for a multiple origin of the historic and recent races of horses, has collected a mass of information about the marking of famous horses of all ages in his Origin and Influence of the Thoroughbred Horse.  He maintains that a bay livery, with a white star and stockings, the development of protective coloration from an originally striped coat, such as has gone on more recently in the case of the quaggas, is absolute evidence of the North African origin of a horse, and he shows that all the swiftest horses mentioned in history are of that race, while the heavier and less mettlesome horses of Northern origin have been, when pure bred, dun coloured or white.

Of the Italian breeds mentioned by Varro, Professor Ridgeway conjectures that the Etruscan (or Rosean) was probably an improved Northern horse, while the Apulian, from the South of Italy, represented an admixture of Libyan blood.]

[Footnote 141:  Aristotle (H.A. VI, 22) preceded Varro with this good advice, saying that a mare “produces better foals at the end of four or five years.  It is quite necessary that she should wait one year and should pass through a fallow, as it were—­[Greek:  poiein osper neion].”]