cultivated and more highly favored animal. The zebra and quagga are yet more potent in this strange power of transmitting properties than even the ass; for it is an established fact, on well authenticated record, that a thorough-bred mare having once produced a striped foal to a quagga, continued for several successive generations, when bred to thorough-bred horses and having no further connection with the quagga, to produce striped offspring, the stripes becoming fainter and fainter in each successive foal; a fact which has led, in connection with other circumstances, some of the best French Physiologists to the conclusion that a female, which has once borne a hybrid, becomes herself a hybrid, and can never again bear a perfect animal of her own race; a fact certainly worthy the consideration of persons who, like the breeder of the mules in the advertisement quoted above, stint mares of such blood as Grey Eagle and Wagner to Maltese jacks. Only imagine their faces, should they after this breed the same mares to a Lexington, a Monarch or a Revenue, and find the progeny, on its appearance, long-eared, with a stripe along its back and a bar across its shoulders.
It is clear, then, that while in all hybrids of the horse and ass, the latter gives the greater proportion both of external and internal characteristics, it is determined by the sire, not by the dam, in what degree that excess shall exist; and this principle will lead to a full understanding of how mules may be bred to the best advantage.
Thus, if we are breeding mules, on the spirit, courage, temper and characteristics of the male ass, everything will depend in the production of the like qualities in the progeny: while so long as the mare is sound, strong enough, bony enough, and roomy, it will matter very little, so far as the characteristics of the young are concerned, whether she be a Suffolk Punch, or as pure a thorough-bred as
