WILD WOOL 



Desirable breeds blundered upon by long 

 series of groping experiments are often found 

 to be unstable and subject to disease — bots, 

 foot-rot, blind-staggers, etc. — causing infinite 

 trouble, both among breeders and manufac- 

 turers. Would it not be well, therefore, for 

 some one to go back as far as possible and take 

 a fresh start? 



The source or sources whence the various 

 breeds were derived is not positively known, 

 but there can be hardly any doubt of their 

 being descendants of the four or five wild 

 species so generally distributed throughout the 

 mountainous portions of the globe, the marked 

 differences between the wild and domestic spe- 

 cies being readily accounted for by the known 

 variability of the animal, and by the long series 

 of painstaking selection to which all its char- 

 acteristics have been subjected. No other 

 animal seems to yield so submissively to the 

 manipulations of culture. Jacob controlled the 

 color of his flocks merely by causing them to 

 stare at objects of the desired hue; and pos- 

 sibly Merinos may have caught their wrinkles 

 from the perplexed brows of their breeders. 

 The California species {Ovis montanaY is a 



* The wild sheep of CaHfornia are now classified as Ovis 

 nelsoni. Whether those of the Shasta region belonged to the 

 latter species, or to the bighorn species of Oregon, Idaho, 

 and Washington, is still an unsettled question. [Editor.] 



17 



