540 SHEEP MOUNTAIN AND MOORLAND 



of food, speedily overtook their neighbours in the field. 

 From this time onward each season's lot of lambs has been 

 housed in the last week of November with most satisfactory 

 results. There have been fewer casualties, and bent or 

 rickety legs ; and no rheumatism, which was not uncommon 

 among those wintered out. There was then no cramming 

 such as is now too frequently practised, on about i Ib. each of 

 mixed maize and cotton-cake, new milk, cod-liver oil, and as 

 much chaffed rye-grass hay as they can eat. Overfeeding is a 

 recent development in a very wrong direction. It began with 

 the ram lambs during the winter months, and has extended 

 to the even more injurious custom of housing and forcing 

 the sucking lambs in the summer with cabbages and grain. 

 Everyone concerned knows this will end in disaster, and 

 that it is rapidly ruining the hardiest mountain breed of 

 Scotland ; but it will probably go on increasing till one of 

 the great snowstorms which are recorded in the history of 

 this country as occurring on an average once in two genera- 

 tions (every sixty years) comes to teach the wholesome lesson 

 necessary to save the breed from destruction. A ram which 

 has been forced in feeding while young, not only begets 

 softer offspring, but he is always more difficult to keep in 

 condition on grass in summer and harder to winter. Another 

 disadvantage of forced feeding is that it produces coarse and 

 unshapely animals out of what are naturally the best sheep, 

 and buyers are induced to select rams which have developed 

 from small or badly-nursed lambs that do not so readily 

 show in their external form the injurious influence of having 

 been forced. This is largely accountable for the recent 

 decrease in the size of the breed. 



McKersie, of Glenbuck, and Foyers, of Knowehead, 

 Campsie, were the two most prominent ram breeders of 

 the third quarter of last century. 



With the low price of wool which ruled for nearly twenty 

 years towards the end of the century, and the preference for 

 young mutton and for beef, the keeping of Blackface wethers 

 became unremunerative, and this of course encouraged the 

 natural tendency to throw the higher and more exposed hill 

 ranges into deer forests. 



In country towns in Scotland at the beginning of the 

 last quarter of the nineteenth century, more than double 



