FINE WOOL SHEEP HUSBANDRY. 165 



TJ ey also, unlike any other of our valuable domestic 

 arimals, exert a direct and observable influence in 

 hanishing coarse, wild, poor grasses from their pas- 

 ares, and bringing in the sweeter and more nutritious 



Yet dairying is wholly driving out wool-growing in 

 the grazing portions of our State, and grazing cattle 

 are preferred to sheep on probably a majority of our 

 grain farms. The remarkable decrease of the latter 

 in proportion to our population is made apparent by 

 the following table, compiled from the United States 

 and State censuses. Mr. Kennedy, Superintendent of 

 the United States Census office, has kindly furnished 

 me with statistics of the census of 1860, in advance of 

 their official publication : 



were partly overrun with blackberry "and black and red raspberry 

 bushes. I stocked the land heavily with sheep. The next year 

 almost every bush was dead, most of them apparently untouched by 

 the sheep, certainly bearing no marks of having been stripped of their 

 bark. I had not dreamed of the sheep effecting any thing like such a 

 rapid and wholesale extermination ; but it was generally attributed to 

 them, and no other cause for it could be even conjectured. Many of 

 the bushes had been peeled by the sheep, and the extremities, buds, 

 flowers, &c., nipped off. Sheep will frequently attack the elder (Sam- 

 bucus Canadensis et pubescens) at particular periods of the year. In- 

 deed, the tender leaves and buds of few bushes escape them. They 

 attack some weeds, but banish more of them by manuring the land 

 and increasing the growth of grass, so that the weeds are run out. 

 Where the Canada thistle ( Carduus arvensis) is not tall and rank, sheep 

 will generally keep it from becoming so, where the land is not very 

 rich, by nipping off the tops and the flowers. I do not know however 

 that it meddles at all with the common thistle ( C. lanceolate}. 



* They effect this principally through their superiority as manuring 

 animals. I have used the term " valuable" domestic animals, for I 

 suppose the goat would probably produce the same effect with the 

 sheep, in these particulars. 



