I00 THE SCOTTISH NATURALIST 



SOME EARLY REFERENCES TO FOUR-HORNED 

 SHEEP IN SCOTLAND. 



By James Ritchie, M.A., D.Sc, Royal Scottish Museum. 



Any sport of nature arouses a passing interest. Therefore, 

 when the sport is a marked one, when it is insistent in 

 succeeding generations, and persistent through the centuries, 

 when, besides, it is associated with distinctive qualities of 

 commercial value, one anticipates little difficulty in tracing 

 its existence and distribution in the written records of 

 history. Notwithstanding that four-horned sheep fulfil all 

 the above conditions of notoriety, the historical information 

 regarding their occurrence in Scotland seems to be of the 

 scantiest. On this account a few early references, stumbled 

 upon by the writer in the course of miscellaneous reading, 

 may prove of interest, the more so as they do not appear to 

 have found a place in the recent literature of the subject. 



The origin of four-horned sheep is of so great antiquity 

 that no direct evidence regarding it is available. From 

 a consideration of the characteristics of the animals them- 

 selves, however, Professor Cossar Ewart 1 regards them 

 as belonging to a hybrid race which has arisen from the 

 mating of ancestors belonging to the wild urial and mouflon 

 types of sheep, the former of which is still found from Eastern 

 Persia to Tibet, while the latter appears to be confined at 

 the present day to Western Asia, Corsica, Sardinia, and 

 Sicily. Whatever their origin may have been, two facts 

 stand clearly forth. First, that four-horned sheep belong 

 to an exceedingly old type, for their remains have been 

 recovered from deposits of the Bronze Age ; and, secondly, 

 that the type has been a stable and predominant one, for 

 nowadays it is to be found scattered over most parts of the 

 world, and recent experiments in crossing show that the 

 progeny of a four-horned ram is almost certain, in one 

 generation or another, to exhibit this parental peculiarity. 



1 Ewart, " Domestic Sheep and their Wild Ancestors," part i., Trans. 

 Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland, Ser. 5, vol. xxv., 191 3, 

 p. 1 60 et sea. 



