White. — On Breeding Black Sheep. 191 



Art. XX. — Breeding Black Sheep : a Study in Colour. 

 By Taylor White. 



[Read before the Hawke's Bay Philosophical Institute, 26th October, 



1900.] 



For many years I have felt a great desire to experiment in an 

 attempt to mate the black ewes which occasionally appear 

 even in well-bred and carefully selected nocks of white sheep 

 of different breeds with the black rams appearing in the same 

 manner, not that 1 believe in the romantic biblical account of 

 the mild swindle worked by the patriarch Jacob to obtain 

 coloured and spotted cattle in the flocks of his uncle Laban, 

 by placing rods having their bark removed in alternate rings 

 in situations to be seen and noticed by the breeding-flocks 

 when coming to the drinking-places, and thereby bringing 

 about many cases of " mother-marking " ; nor do I believe in 

 the necessity for the great precautions taken by the late 

 Mr. Macombie (the one time celebrated breeder of black 

 polled Angus cattle) to have high paling fences erected, so 

 as to prevent his pregnant cows from seeing other beasts 

 of various colours when such might be passing along the 

 contiguous main road, and thereby bring about cases of 

 mother-marking. And, in my opinion, the incident mentioned 

 in connection with this herd, in which several parti-coloured 

 calves were at one season produced; the mothers having been 

 influenced by the sight of coloured steers grazing in an ad- 

 joining field, is absurd. I think possibly the true cause was 

 that among these supposed steers was an immature bull, 

 which may have entered the adjoining field among the black 

 cows unknown to Mr. Macombie, who would thus conclude 

 that the red-and-white calves afterwards born were the result 

 of an impression received through the eyesight of the mothers 

 when pregnant to a black bull of the Angus breed. 



If mother-marking were possible we might expect animals 

 to be born of abnormal colouring — such as green, blue, scarlet, 

 &c. ; but we find that any species of animal can only vary in 

 colours or shades of colouring within certain limits. These 

 limits include accidental cases of melanism, or blackness, and 

 albinism, or deficiency of the secretion of the substance named 

 "pigment," or colouring-matter. True cases of albinism rarely 

 occur among those animals which prove capable of thorough 

 domestication by man. Grey horses, white cattle and sheep, 

 and the Angora goat are not true albinos, for their eyes, horns, 

 and hoofs retain the colouring-pigment ; but rabbits, ferrets, 



