STIEEP. 297 



sistence on the rough mountain pasture, where the more delicately constituted improved 

 breed would utterly fail. They will often pick up a scanty subsistence beneath the 

 snows in the severe winter season. Their chief defects are in the quality of their wool, 

 which is very coarse, and the slowness of fattening until their full growth is attained. Their 

 wool is often mixed with kemps or hairs, which detracts from its value; it is also quite 

 uneven and is used for carpets and coarse cloths, and weighs about three pounds per fleece. 



Cl OSS Breeds and Grades. Some of the best breeds now extant have been obtained 

 through judicious crossing, such as the Oxfords, for instance, produced by a cross between 

 the Cotswold, Southdown, and Hampshire Down, besides various other valuable breeds that 

 might be mentioned as the result of intelligent and painstaking effort in the improvement of 

 stock of different kinds. 



Experiments in this direction are often resorted to by farmers, when the results fail to 

 be satisfactory, inasmuch as they may fail in selecting those individuals of their flock possess, 

 ing the qualities adapted to the best results from a lack of knowledge and experience in the 

 art of breeding, and also from expecting too marked results in a short time. 



It must be remembered that some of the best efforts in establishing a breed possessing a 

 fixed type, and the power of repeating or reproducing uniformly its most desirable character 

 istics, requires the labor of a series of years, or almost a lifetime of unremitting skill and 

 perseverance, and with the main points to be reached and the well-defined object to be 

 attained constantly in view. And when the establishing of a valuable breed has been accom 

 plished, it must be kept pure and free from the intermingling of other blood, in order to be 

 kept up to the highest standard of excellence. &quot;We are greatly indebted to the patient perse 

 verance of skillful breeders of years past as well as the present, for the valuable breeds we 

 now have. 



lion John L. Hayse, Secretary of the National Association of &quot;Wool Manufacturers, 

 says: &quot;The breeding of animals is now recognized as among the greatest of the creative arts. 

 Professor Agassiz says enthusiastically of the stock breeders of the present day: The prac 

 tical realization of a theoretical acquisition has led them to make science the foundation of 

 their business. From very empirical workmen they have raised themselves to be a class of 

 thinking workers, who, as regards mental range, will very soon surpass every other industrial 

 class, and before long will give society a totally new impress. 



No class of stock-growers have done so much to merit this high praise as the breeders 

 of sheep. This species being so plastic in its character that the breeder, according to Lord 

 Somerville s celebrated saying, may chalk out upon a wall a form perfect in itself, and then 

 givo it existence, presents the most signal illustrations of the modern doctrine of evolution. 

 The breeder has become a veritable creator. The products of his art have the permanency 

 of primeval species. There are convincing reasons for believing that the precious Merino 

 was converted by the art of man from the coarsest of the primeval sheep, the hair being 

 dropped, and the underlying down, found still in the rudest of the ovine races, having been 

 developed into fine wool. All the most valuable long-wooled races of England, so distinct in 

 their char.icters, have been developed by human agency. The Merino of Spain has been 

 converted on the one hand to the electoral race of Germany, and the sheep Naz of France; 

 producing fleeces of the utmost fineness, but weighing not more than a pound and a half, and 

 with a length of fibre of less than an inch; and, on the other, to the Rambouillet sheep, pro 

 ducing fleeces of thirty pounds weight, with a length of five inches. 



New and unexpected qualities appear from time to time through accident, which the 

 breeder turns to advantage, such as the silky Mauchamp wool, rivaling the Cashmere, or even 

 modifications of the skeleton form of the animal, as in the Ancon or otter sheep of Rhode 

 Island, with limbs so formed that it cannot jump fences. A new attribute attained by the 



