92 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



want to, and laugh at it ; call it " a pile of grease," if you want 

 to, and laugh at that ; but there is no question that here in New 

 England, under the influence of our climate and our soil, and 

 with the application of the care and intelligence of the New 

 England farmer, we can produce a sheep which combines more 

 of the qualities of a good mutton-growing and wool-growing 

 animal than any other sheep in the world, and nobody can gain- 

 say it ; and if you raise fifty pounds of wool upon the back of 

 one animal, and when you come to wash it it is reduced down 

 to seven, you can still see that that is the best and most profit- 

 able sheep for New England and for America. He has a hardy, 

 solid frame, not maturing rapidly, so that the farmer is obliged 

 to fatten him from infancy up ; capable of enduring hardship 

 and of being reduced in flesh at a year old and brought up 

 again like a Devon or an Ayrshire ; a prim, hardy animal, better 

 adapted to improve sheep-husbandry than any other that I know ; 

 vastly better than any sheep bred upon the fat pastures of Eng- 

 land or raised in the warm stalls of New England. You cannot 

 raise them everywhere. You can do it in New England and 

 New York. But you cannot take these sheep to Texas or Brazil 

 and keep them up to their standard. The climate, the soil, the 

 grass, the water, the feed, the general influences, all tend to 

 make that animal a little softer in all his texture and fibre ; his 

 wool is set with less compactness, and when you put it into the 

 card it does not work so well ; so that at last a New England 

 manufacturer has been honest and fair enough to say that the 

 wool grown upon sheep in other countries does not compare for 

 one moment with the fibre raised here in New England and the 

 Northern and North-Western States ; that is, from sheep 

 descended directly from the " improved American merino," bred 

 and improved here in New England. There is no doubt about 

 that ; so that all the mestizo wools, that fly about the cards like 

 the down of a thistle, almost, are absolutely held together by what 

 is sneeringly called " the grease of the improved American 

 merino." This we can do here in New England, the fountain 

 of that sheep blood which is to keep the rivers of wool flowing 

 and in good condition in the United States. I say, this we can 

 do here in New England. It requires care, it gets care, and it 

 repays. 



