| than fourteen hands high. 
clean. They carry their head elevated, and have 
fine well-formed legs, which they throw out 
gracefully in walking or galloping. They are 
used only for the saddle, and are imported in vast 
numbers into Persia, where they are frequently 
sold for 400 livres, and, being taught an easy 
ambling pace, are richly caparisoned, and used 
only by the rich and luxurious nobles.” An im- 
proved and costly domestic breed, used princi- 
| pally for the production of strong, active, and 
high-priced mules, occurs in Kentucky and other 
central parts of the United States. Numbers of 
these are fifteen hands high, and some are six- 
teen; and all are the offspring of Maltese asses 
crossed with asses of Spain and the South of 
France, none of which as imported stood more 
Instances have re- 
cently occurred in America of £250 being refused 
| for a yearling female ass, of a two-year old male 
ass being estimated at upwards of £600, and of 
an ass of great celebrity having been sold for 
£1,000. Yet the average market price of the un- 
improved, abused, dwarfish ass of Great Britain 
and Ireland is only about twenty shillings. 
The ass, when properly trained and humanely 
treated, is docile, sagacious, good-tempered, and 
susceptible of strong attachment to his master; 
in his natural temper, he is as humble, patient, 
and quiet, as the horse is proud, fiery, and impe- 
tuous; and, though he eventually acquires indo- 
cility and stubbornness from injudicious training 
and brutal treatment, he long resists the natural 
effects of unkindness, and always, in a high de- 
gree, bears chastisements and blows with firm- 
ness or even with courage. With regard to both 
the quantity and quality of his food, he is emi- 
nently temperate, often maintaining himself on 
one-half of what would seem to be sufficient for 
his wants, and uniformly contenting himself with 
_ dry leaves, briars, thistles, road-side forage, and 
almost any sort of harsh or disagreeable herbs, 
which the horse and other domestic animals will 
not touch; but in his drink, he is very nice, using 
only such water as is perfectly clear, and prefer- 
ring to drink at portions of limpid brooks with 
which he has become acquainted. He requires 
very little management; he sustains hunger, 
thirst, neglect, and labour, more than most other 
animals; he is seldom or never sick ; and, after 
hard labour, and as if to save his driver all 
trouble, he rolls himself on a rough hard road, 
and rises refreshed and good-humoured. He 
may be lightly worked, or at least actively trained 
at two years of age; he is fully able for routine 
work at three years; and, if tolerably well used, 
he will continue to labour till the age of thirty. 
| The milk of the female is very light and nutri- 
_ tious, and is used by persons of diseased powers 
| of digestion; and the skin of both the male and 
the female is peculiarly hard and elastic, and is 
used for parchment, drum-heads, and other spe- 
cial purposes. The female breeds at two years 
of age. It is universally known that many ani- 
ASS. 
mals will continue to give milk not only after the 
young are removed, but even for years, when the 
impression of having had young must have been 
entirely forgotten. The cow and the goat are in- 
stances of this kind ; but in the ass the secretion 
of milk is not continued after the mother has 
lost the impression of her foal’s existence. This 
is a fact so well known to the keepers of asses, 
that whenever an ass’s foal dies, they take every 
means in their power to keep up the impression, 
in the mother, of the foal being still alive, to 
keep her in milk. For this purpose they take off 
the skin of the foal and preserve it, so that it 
may be occasionally thrown over the back of an. 
other foal, and smelled by the mother, more par- 
ticularly at the time they are milking her. The 
ass, under the deception of having her own foal, 
gives down her milk, and the secretion is carried 
on as usual; but if this artifice be neglected she 
soon goes dry. ‘To ascertain this fact more ac- 
curately, the celebrated Mr. John Hunter put it 
to the test of experiment. He took an ass, in 
milk, and kept her apart from her foal every 
night, but had the mother milked in the morning 
in presence of the foal. This was done for more 
than a month, without there being any diminu- 
tion in the morning’s milk. The foal was then | 
taken away altogether, and the mother was 
milked instead of being sucked by the foal, par- 
ticularly in the evening, at the same hour at | 
which the foal had been taken from her, and | 
The | 
again in the morning at the usual hour. 
milk taken in the morning was always compared 
with that taken in the morning before, but in 
three mornings the quantity was lessened; and 
the fifth morning there was hardly any. The 
foal was then restored to her; but she would not | 
allow it to suck. The experiment was repeated 
with similar results. 
The ass, even in his present unimproved con- 
dition in Great Britain and,Ireland, deserves ten- | 
fold more attention from farmers than he has 
hitherto obtained. On the cabin-farms of Ive- 
land, where the routine-work is greatly too little 
for the employment of the horse or even of the 
ox, the services of the ass are very available and 
in extensive requisition. But even on the large 
farms of England and Scotland, the ass might, 
with great saving of care and money to the far- 
mer, be, to a considerable extent, effectively em- 
ployed instead of the horse. What, for example, 
should prevent the ass from acting as efficiently 
as the horse in opening small drills, earthing up | 
cabbages, carting home turnips or rape, going to | 
‘the mill or the market, turning a churn-wheel, 
and, in general, performing the numberless kinds 
of light draught? And if the ass might be as 
serviceable as the horse in only one instance in 
ten in which draught-labour is required, what 
but sheer prodigal waste is it, sanctioned by no- 
thing better than stupid prejudice, to maintain 
horses for all draught-labour whatever, and not, 
as far as practicable, to substitute them by the 
