536 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



can command. All this makes it perfectly certain that there must have been 

 a great drain on Irish horses, not only those fit for cavalry, but cart horses, 

 which Wellington tells us are unfit for that purpose, and lighter horses used 

 for draught and transport. This depletion of the country as to horses must 

 have given a singular advantage to those vrho offered the ass as a cheap and 

 safe substitute, not liable to be bought at fancy prices for the war : and so by 

 some silent process, probably by the poor, and for the poor, this useful beast 

 of burden came into Ireland almost surreptitiously, till it spread over all the 

 country. While the great Duke was conquering the Peninsula, the little ass 

 was conquering Ireland. And, let me add, that a peaceful conquest is oft€n 

 more enduring than a brilliant one. The bray of the ass may signify more 

 lasting peace than the blare of the trumpet. I cannot abandon the conjecture, 

 though I have found no evidence, that the tinkei-s or gipsies were the agents 

 who produced the change. Sir Charles Coote, as you have heard, spoke of 

 importations of ponies from Eathlin — why not equally asses from the 

 neighbouring Galloway ? 



ily friend Mr. "W. G. Strickland tells me that he remembers seeing when 

 he was a boy, in the county of Eoscommon, an old man who was said to 

 have helped his father, and himself made his livelihood, by the trade of 

 going to Scotland, and thence importing asses to the north of Ireland, and on 

 to the west. I think it very likely that this accidental bit of information 

 may yet be the clue which will lead us to the solution of the problem 



Unfortunately the history of Ireland for the first twenty yeare aft«r the 

 Union is very little studied. As the political interest in the country was 

 abolished by the Union, and great foreign wars engrossed all men's attention, 

 there are but few students who have occupied themselves with that period. 

 I, for example, who know something about the Ireland of the eigliteeuth 

 century, know hardly anything about the early nineteenth, beyond what my 

 mother used to tell me of the social life of Dublin. I earnestly hope some 

 younger member of the Academy, interested in Irish history, will take up 

 that neglected period, and make us know more of the life of the people 100 

 years ago, before the collapse of high prices for hoi-ses, cattle, and agricultural 

 produce after the war, and some bad harvests in the twenties, led to new 

 troubles, such as the tithe war, and other movements which were the beginning 

 of modem Irish agrarian agitation. In these troubles none stood by the Irish 

 poor better than the patient, despised ass. 



Quite apart from these historical studies, I can tell zoologists who are in 

 search of a new and attractive subject that there is in all the libraries I have 

 consulted, even in our College library, and the London Library, for which my 

 friend Dr. Hagberg Wright has compiled a valuable subject catalogue — in 



