ESSENTIALS TO SUCCESS. 87 



Flock for male lambs served by rams over 4 years old : 



Sex of the Lambs. 



Age of Ewes. Males. Females. 



Two years old 7 3 



Three years old 15 14 



Four years old 32 14 



Total 55 31 



The result certainly justified the expectation, but it can scarcely 

 be held to be anything more than suggestive for further research 

 or experiment, rather than conclusive for the founding of a rule. 

 The following well considered remarks made by the Hon. A. M. 

 Garland, editor in charge of the sheep and wool department of the 

 National Live-Stock Journal, at a meeting of the Madison Co., (111.) 

 Farmers' Club, May 8th, 1875, are sufficiently valuable and perti- 

 nent to be recorded here : " One essential to successful breeding is 

 a persistent endeavor to attain the standard that has been fixed 

 upon by the breeder as his idea of the perfect animal. While the 

 sheep will be found to conform more readily than any other ani- 

 mal, except perhaps the dog, to certain well understood physio- 

 logical laws, the attainment of all the desired characteristics, and 

 their incorporation into the life and constitution so as to insure 

 transmission with the desired force and certainty, is a labor involv- 

 ing not alone judgment and taste, but patience as well. Mythology 

 tells us of the goddess who leaped full-armed from the head of 

 Jove ; but the attainment of perfect ends without the employment 

 of patient and laborious means, is not among the blessings that 

 surround the business man in this material age. He who expects 

 to accomplish in a year what others have only completed in a life- 

 time of labor, is pretty surely doomed to gather the bitter fruit of 

 disappointment, and the chances are largely in favor of pecuniary 

 loss as well. It required over fifty years of labor, and care, and 

 study, to bring the nine-pound fleece rams imported by Humphrey 

 and others, up to the 25 and 30 pound shearers that head a number 

 of the flocks of the present day. The highest types of the Cots- 

 wold and Southdown are the result of an expenditure of time, and 

 money, and study, equal to that bestowed upon the Merino in the 

 United States in the last half a century. Such facts as these afford 

 small encouragement for those young men who see visions, and 

 those older ones who dream dreams, of a speedy fortune and an 

 assured fame by the establishment of an intermediate breed of 

 sheep one that will combine in a single animal the good qualities 

 of all the breeds and the weak points of none. Any of the estab- 



