Domestic Animals / History and description of the horse, mule, cattle, sheep, swine, poultry and farm dogs; with directions for their management, breeding, crossing, rearing, feeding, and preparation for a profitable market; also their diseases and remedies. Together with full directions for the management of the dairy.

by Richard Lamb Allen

THE ASS

Is a native of Arabia, Persia, and the central parts of Asia and Africa. Like the horse, he goes in troops and displays great natural sagacity, activity, and courage. Job says, "He scorneth the multitude of the city, neither regardeth the crying of the driver." Like the horse, too, he has from time immemorial been tamed, and become the faithful servant of man; but unlike him, he is subject to few maladies, is hardy and enduring, and subsists and even thrives on coarse and scanty forage. Thus Job says of his natural haunts, "Whose house I have made the wilderness, and the barren land his dwellings; the range of the mountains is his pasture, and he searcheth after every green thing." Xenophon, in his Anabasis, a thousand years later, says of one of the Asiatic deserts through which he passed with the army of Cyrus, "that it was full of wormwood; if any other kinds of shrubs or reeds grew there, they had all an aromatic smell; but no trees appeared. Of wild creatures, the most numerous are wild asses, which our horses sometimes chased; but the wild asses exceeded them much in speed."