Vulgar words in A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. (Page 1)
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Thus, for instance, the lion, the antelope, and the wild ass are all sand-colored.
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As I followed them in their course I fancied I saw troops of yet another animal of the horse tribe, the "Kulan," or _Equus hemionus_, which is a kind of half horse, half ass (p. 393), living on the Kirghiz steppes of Tartary and spreading far beyond the range of the Tarpan into Tibet.
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No one has ever yet settled the question whether he is a horse or an ass, probably because he represents an animal truly between the two.
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His head is graceful, his body light, his legs slender and fleet, yet his ears are long and ass-like; he has narrow hoofs, and a tail with a tuft at the end like all the ass tribe; his color is a yellow brown, and he has a short dark mane and a long dark stripe down his back as a donkey has, though this last character you may also see in many of our Devonshire ponies.
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No; for from the dreary Asiatic deserts my thoughts wandered to a far warmer and more fertile land, where between the Blue Nile and the Red Sea rise the lofty highlands of Abyssinia, among which the African wild ass (_Asinus tæniopus_), the probable ancestor of our donkeys, feeds in troops on the rich grasses of the slopes, and then onwards to the bank of a river in Central Africa where on the edge of a forest, with rich pastures beyond, elephants and rhinoceroses, antelopes and buffaloes, lions and hyænas, creep down in the cool of the evening to slake their thirst in the flowing stream.
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I might now have travelled still farther in search of the Onager, or wild ass of the Asiatic and Indian deserts, but at this point a more interesting and far wider question presented itself, as I flung myself down on the moor to ponder over the early history of all these tribes.
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[Illustration: SKELETON OF HORSE OR ASS.