On the first day of January, 1905, we had in the United States 2,888,710 mules with a taxable value of $251,840,378. This shows how extensive an industry mule-breeding is, and also what an important place the mule occupies in the economy of the country. The mule is an ideal farm animal. They would find it hard to get along without him on the plantations in the South. The negro is the poorest horseman in the world. As a groom he is careless and neglectful. A horse must be attended to or he will get ill and die. The mule seems, if not to thrive on neglect, at least not seriously to deteriorate. On many of the Southern plantations mules never know either currycomb or brush during all their long lives. And they live to a great age. I have never seen any statement based on carefully ascertained statistics at to the comparative length life of the horse and mule, but I am persuaded, from my own observation that on an average a mule lives twenty-five per cent longer. And there is pretty nearly as much work in an old mule as in a young one. They can also be put to hard work sooner than a horse. So the working life of a mule is lengthened at both ends. Moreover, they can subsist on what would be starvation for a horse. If mules were bred at all in America in the Colonial era it was to a very limited extent. But after the Revolution they were bred a little, and George Washington was the man who encouraged this new industry. In 1786, before his election to the Presidency, Washington accepted from the King of Spain the present of a large Spanish Jack. He called the jack Royal Gift, and thus advertised his services in a Philadelphia paper: