32 THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARC.E. 



culty, and butting at his two brothers until at 

 last he lost his balance and fell. This one 

 old stump was the sole representative in their 

 limited experience of the rocky pinnacle 

 upon which their forefathers kept watch like 

 sentinels ; and their instinctive yearnings 

 prompted them to perch themselves upon 

 the only available memento of their native 

 haunts. Thus, too, but in a dimmer and 

 vaguer way, the sheep, especially during his 

 younger days, loves to revert, so far as his 

 small opportunities permit him, to the un- 

 consciously remembered habits of his race. 

 But in mountain countries, every one must 

 have noticed how the sheep at once becomes 

 a different being. On the Welsh hills he 

 casts away all the dull and heavy serenity of 

 his brethren on the South Downs, and dis- 

 plays once more the freedom, and even the 

 comparative boldness, of a mountain breed. 

 A Merionethshire ewe thinks nothing of run- 

 ning up one side of a low-roofed barn and 

 down the other, or of clearing a stone wall 



