258 Extract from Mr. Livingston’s Essay on Sheep. 
fifty pounds. Another species have the tail broad and flat, 
but not very long, covered with wool above, but smooth 
below, and divided by a furrow into two lobes of flesh ; these 
are also said to weigh above thirty pounds: I should not 
however estimate the weight of those which I saw in the 
Menagerie at Paris, at more than ten or twelve pounds. Jn 
some species a small thin tail projects from the center of this 
fleshy excrescence. The composition of this excrescence is 
said to be a mixture of flesh with a great proportion of fat, 
and to be a very delicate food ; but the animal has little 
other fat, the tail being in him the repository of that fat 
which lays about the loins of other sheep. In cold climates 
the fat of the tail resembles suet ; but in warm ones, as at the 
Cape of Good Hope, Madagascar &c. it is so soft that when 
melted it willnot harden again. The inhabitants mix it with 
tallow in certain proportions, when it assumes the consistency 
of hogs lard, and is then eaten like butter, or used for culinary 
purposes. Naturalists imagine that this excrescence is owing to 
some circumstances in the food of the sheep, which makes the 
fat fall down from the loin into the tail, and thus occasions this 
monstrosity. 1 do not, however, think this probable, since the 
prodigious extent of country through which this race is pro= 
pagated, must render the food as various as the climates in 
which they are bred. I rather think that 2¢ owes its origin to 
the art of man, grounded on some of those sports of nature, 
which in all domestic animals, afford a basis whereon to en- 
graft his whims.” 
28. 29. “ It may be asked to what end would man culti- 
vate this deformity, and that too through so extensive a re- 
gion as to forbid our attributing it to whim or fashion ? may 
not the shepherd who jirst observed this Lusus Nature in his 
flock have concluded, that he had made a very valuable ac- 
quisition, since he not only had a sheep that gave him as 
much wool, milk ar flesh as the rest of his flock, but a tail, 
. which in addition, gave him a comfortable meal, or what is 
