SAVING THE SIX-NIPPLED BREED 



Alkxanuer Graham Rell 

 Mr. Bell's Last Contribution to Science, with An Introduction by Mrs. Bell 



ITNDER this title Dr. Alexander 

 j Graham Bell in June of this 

 year [1!)2"2] dictated for preser- 

 vation in his note-hooks the last of his 

 summaries of his breed of "Multi- 

 nippled Sheep" which for the past few 

 years he had been in the habit of mak- 

 ing every spring. 



Whether he had any feeling that 

 each such summary might be his last 

 report on his long-continued sheep ex- 

 periments does not appear. He never 

 said so. But he was one of those un- 

 hurried souls who are "Prepared to die 

 today, but live as if sure of a hundred 

 years for work." 



Behind this title lies a whole romance 

 as yet untold, full of dramatic incidents 

 epitomic of Mr. Bell's own character. 



As this sheep experiment was one of 

 the last, so it was one of the first of 

 the many investigations in which Mr. 

 Bell engaged while living on Cape Bre- 

 ton Island, and a brief account of its 

 beginning may possibly prove inter- 

 esting. 



In the year 1886 :Mr. and Mrs. Bell 

 brought their two little girls to Bad- 

 deck, having determined to make their 

 summer home on the island. 



They found a tiny deserted cottage, 

 sufficiently far from the village, and 

 near the water's edge to satisfy their 

 requirements for the time. The cot- 

 tage had no furniture except a dining- 

 table, and little could be bought in the 

 village, so the family themselves made 

 most of what they needed, and slept 

 on bags stufifed with hay. 



To this primitive, but very happy 

 home, Mr. Bell one day brought a little 

 lamb. It soon became part of the fam- 

 ily circle, following the children wher- 

 ever they went, in and out of the house. 

 When the time came to leave for the 

 winter the children would not hear of 

 giving away their pet, so arrangements 



were made for its care through the 

 winter. The next summer when the 

 family returned, two sheep, the mother 

 sheep and her little lamb, greeted them. 



But why only one lamb? 



A progeny of nineteen was no un- 

 common event in a pig's family. Even 

 dogs generally had as many as six at a 

 birth, while twin lambs were rare, and 

 quadruples unheard of. Yet there was 

 valuable wool and meat to be obtained 

 from sheep. Would not twins double 

 the farmer's income without materially 

 increasing his labor? 



The argument that he preferred one 

 good lamb to two poor ones did not 

 seem conclusive to Mr. Bell, for the 

 farmer most certainly had no objection 

 to many pig babies, and neither the pig 

 nor the dog mother had difficulty in 

 rearing a large proportion of their 

 children to fine maturity. Why could 

 not the sheep do so too? The problem 

 fascinated Mr. Bell. Here was what 

 seemed to him an opportunity to satis- 

 fy his scientific curiosity, and at the 

 same time serve the people among 

 whom he had made his home. 



Mr. Bell began the investigation of 

 his problem by a careful physical exam- 

 ination of the sheep themselves, and 

 soon discovered that while dogs have 

 •several milk-bags, and pigs, with much 

 larger litters, have a great number of 

 them ; sheep as a rule only possessed 

 one pair. Here, he considered, might 

 lie the cause of the difference in the 

 number of young produced. Of course 

 the number of children a mother can 

 profitably rear must bear some propor- 

 tion to the amount of milk she had for 

 them, and this also was dependent on 

 the number of milk-bags, or nipples 

 she possessed. The problem therefore 

 at the very outset narrowed down to 

 the possibility of multiplying the num- 

 ber of nipples found on a sheep. 



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