ORIGIN OF THE DONKEY. 783 



for the present year, says, " To own a saw-mill to-day, with ten years' 

 supply of standing timber, is to have that which is far better and 

 safer than a gold-mine in the Occident." The same paper also says : 

 " The amount of timber cut from the forests of the Northwest " (mean- 

 ing Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, chiefly) " in 1881, counting 

 that made into shingles with the lumber, exceeded 7,000,000,000 feet. 

 It requires some little grasp of the subject to comprehend such an 

 enormous sum. Loaded on cars, green, it would make a train nearly 

 seven thousand miles in length. The amount of money required to 

 purchase it from first hands would be not far from $125,000,000." 



With such statements relative to the consumption of our existing 

 forests, from authoritative sources, and the well-known fact that the 

 price of all kinds of lumber has greatly increased during the last ten 

 years, while that of some kinds has doubled, there should be little 

 doubt that, looked at as a pecuniary venture alone, tree-planting on an 

 extensive scale will brino; a sure and abundant reward to those who 

 engage in it. 



ORIGIN" OF THE DONKEY* 



By C, A. FIETREMENT. 



THE majority of modern naturalists have long attributed an Asiatic 

 origin to the domestic asses. They have believed that the spe- 

 cies are derived from the so-called onagras or wild asses of Asia, 

 which the ancients mention, and which are still met wandering in 

 droves of greater or less size, from the northern part of the Altai 

 Mountains to the southern regions of the continent. As late as 1862, 

 Isidore Geoffroy Saint-IIilaire assumed that the primitive country of 

 the ass was partly in Asia, partly in Africa, because, he said, " the ona- 

 gra extends from Asia to Northwestern Africa." In 1869, however, 

 M. H. Milne-Edwards considered it " well demonstrated that the ass is 

 essentially an African species, which occurs in Asia only in a domes- 

 ticated condition ; and that all that the ancients, and modern travel- 

 lers as well, have said of the wild asses or onagras of Syria, Persia, 

 etc., is applicable to the hemippus and other varieties of Eqnus hemi- 

 onas, and not to Equus aslnus. The horse, on the other hand, appears 

 to have originated in Central Asia and a part of Europe. It is pre- 

 sumable that the domestication of the ass was effected in Africa, 

 probably in Upper Egypt or some neighboring country, and that of 

 the horse took place in the region occupied by the Indo-Germanic 

 peoples. If the civilization of Central Asia and Europe had much 



* From a new work, " Les Chevaux dans le Temps prehistoriqucs et historiques " 

 (" Horses in Prehistorical and Historical Times "). Translated and abridged for " The 

 Popular Science Monthly." 



