FINE WOOL SHEEP HUSBANDRY. 143 



A defect may be an individual or family one. The 

 latter is far more likely to be transmitted to the pro- 

 geny. The other sometimes appears to be accidental, 

 and is not forcibly transmitted. I would rather breed 

 from a slightly defective animal from a very perfect 

 family, than from a very perfect animal from a slight- 

 ly defective family. 



The obstinacy with which family peculiarities are 

 sent down to remote generations, finds constant exem- 

 plifications. Do we not, in the red and tawny and 

 occasionally black spots which appear on the legs, 

 ears, and even bodies of new born Merino lambs, find 

 traces of the fine-wooled flocks of those colors in 

 Spain, described ages ago by Strabo, Pliny and 

 Columella? Between 1824 and 1826 David Ely, of 

 Pompey, ~N. Y., purchased an imported Saxon ram 

 of surprising individual excellence, but marked with 

 this peculiarity: his ears were not half the length or 

 breadth of the normal ear.* He transmitted the same 

 peculiarity to his offspring, and they retransmitted it. 

 I have seen animals of the fifteenth or twentieth cross 

 away from these "little eared sheep," as they are 

 called that is, no ram possessing that characteristic 

 was used in all those crosses and yet the peculiarity 

 was fully preserved. I have seen large, coarse-wool- 

 ed mutton sheep, with Mr. Ely's Saxon blood nearly 

 all bred out, arithmetically speaking, carrying the 



* I think Mr. Grove told me that this peculiarity first originated 

 accidentally or as a monstrosity in Saxony, but that as it occurred on a 

 very superior animal, the owner continued to breed from him and his 

 descendants. They failed, however, to obtain a permanent standing, 

 as their ears did not admit of either of the German systems of num- 

 bering on those members 



