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writings of his on this subject I came to the conclusion that 

 he was absolutely unreliable. I do not want to suggest that 

 Dr. Young writes things which he knows to be untrue, but 

 he has accepted a number of vague statements, and he has 

 stated as facts things which certainly are absolutely different 

 from things which I know myself. And I always say that in 

 any investigation of this sort authority is everything, and if 

 you are not extremely rigid about quoting other people for 

 facts of this sort you are likely to get saddled with all sorts 

 of fancy stories, and you do not know where you are. Now 

 there are various points which, as far as I could gather from 

 Professor Wallace's paper, were taken from Dr. Young, for 

 instance, with regard to the so-called Tibetan sheep. I 

 suppose I saw 100 tons of Tibetan wool in India, and there 

 was not one black fleece in it, and though there are fine- 

 woolled Tibetan sheep, the great majority of Tibetan sheep 

 are kept as beasts of burden, and you might call their fleece 

 hair rather than wool. Then he also spoke of the Afghan 

 sheep being generally red in colour. Now anyone in India 

 has seen any amount of Afghan sheep and lamb skins of 

 various qualities; you can buy them from ten rupees up to 

 500 rupees; and in not one among them have I seen anything 

 at all of the character that we are accustomed to mean by 

 Persian or Bokhara, or Crimean, or Astrachan lamb. My 

 own impression, after having seen sheep in a great many parts 

 of Asia, and after having studied Pallas, and all the other so- 

 called authorities, is 'that I have never attempted to learn any- 

 thing of any subject about which there was so extremely 

 little accurate and reliable information available, because you 

 must remember Pallas travelled nearly 150 years ago, and since 

 his time hardly one line has been written by any man who knew 

 more of the subject than an ordinary traveller might know 

 about the innumerable breeds of sheep in Asia. Now an 

 attempt has been made to distinguish between the so-called 

 fat-tailed sheep and the so-called fat-rumped breeds, and no 

 doubt they are extremely different. But when I asked Pro- 

 fessor Wallace just now whether one of his rams which was 

 shown on the screen was shown with the tail of the natural 

 size, and he said it was, I felt sure that ram was just as much 

 a mongrel as any which Dr. Young has introduced. If there 

 is a pure-bred sheep in Asia I have not seen it, because I 

 believe what is said of the inhabitants of Bokhara is true of 

 all those tribes; they are all mongrels the Mongolian, the 

 Tibetan, and those in North China; I have seen those sheep 

 in the possession of their owners, and there was not one of 

 them in whose flocks I could ever see the slightest trace of 

 care or selection. Thev seem to breed them as the Shetlanders 



