THE UTILIZATION OF MULES. 73 



It being well-known to those who are acquainted with the 

 subject that no satisfactorily authenticated example of a 

 fertile female mule bred between the horse and ass has 

 ever been known, and, as will be shown in the chapter on 

 this subject, that Id the mule breeding districts of France, 

 where many thousand mules are produced annually, 

 such a thing as a fertile female mule is utterly unknown, 

 although the conditions under which the animals are kept 

 would be favourable to such a result. Again, in a 

 manuscript work on the Equidae by the late Colonel 

 Hamilton Smith, illustrated by one hundred folio drawings 

 of the varieties of equine animals, the author states that three 

 male mules are born to one female, a statement not worth 

 quoting or noticing except as illustrating the prevalent 

 ignorance regarding these animals, the proportion of births 

 ■of the two sexes being about equal. But perhaps the 

 most remarkable example of multiplied errors has recently 

 appeared in a book entirely devoted to horses, namely 

 "The Horse World of London,'' by W. J. Gordon, 

 published by the Beligious Tract Society, 1893. The 

 writer states that : — 



•* There are over 200,000 donkeys in Ireland employed in 

 iigriculture, and these are of all sizes, some of the larger having 

 a strain of horse blood in them, as is the case in Italy, where 

 the so-called donkey is a by no means insignificant animal. 

 Italy has more donkeys than any other European country, there 

 being over 700,000 of them there ; while France, which of late 

 years has taken to that most difficult of pursuits, mule-breeding, 

 has 400,000. The great mule-breeding country is, however, the 

 United States, where there are two and a half millions of mules 

 and donkeys taken together, it being found impossible to 

 separate them owing to the varying proportions of horse ancestry 

 producing an indefinite series from the genuine mule to the 

 asinine mulatto. For the male mule is not always sterile, and 



