DISEASES OP SHEEP. 171 



where land is from twenty to one hundred dollars an acre, and with- 

 out stipulating for high prices for mutton and for wool. 



In viewing this branch of industry as it is pursued in other coun- 

 tries, it must be conceded that in none of them is the sheep to be 

 found in such variety as in England, nor are the principles of sheep 

 management anywhere better understood. Ten years since, the 

 number in England was estimated at thirty-two millions, and the 

 value of wool at seven millions pounds sterling; while in tiie United 

 States, one of which is larger than England, there were not exceed- 

 ing twenty millions of sheep in 18 iO. 



But here again, as in other industrial pursuits, the superiority of 

 British husbandry is referable, not to more advanced knowledge, but 

 to lower wages for labour, and to their greater humidity of climate, 

 which enables them to provide succulent rye and other grass pastures 

 in early spring, but more especially in the productiveness of their 

 turnip husbandry. Each contributes to sustain and extend the otlier, 

 and both to supporting and increasing population. But the vast crops 

 of turnips on which English sheep are folded, are produced with an 

 outlay of labour in quantity that nothing but the cheapness of it 

 would warrant, and at an expense after all which shows how as ne- 

 cessary capital is to the best system of tillage as it is to the prosecu- 

 tion of mercantile or any other business. How great again must be 

 the profits of the turnip crop, direct and indirect, to authorise a tenant 

 on land loaded with taxes to go to an expense of nearly fifty dollars 

 per acre in putting in his root crop, as may be seen in the article A}>- 

 praisement, in that inestimable work for the American agriculturist, 

 Governeur Emerson's edition of the American Encyclopedia, pub- 

 lished by Carey & Hart of Philadelphia. The details as there given 

 of expenditures in putting in only seventeen acres of Swedish tur- 

 ■nips, are estimated at nearly nine hundred dollars, a sum actually 

 paid for the crop in the ground, in a case stated by the in-coming 

 tenant. Owing to the mildness of their winter, the turnip crop is 

 left on the land, and sheep are hurdled on small lots at a time. The 

 land is thus wonderfully sustained and improved for the production 

 of barley and wheat, yielding of the latter in many cases forty, fifty, 

 and sixty bushels, and that in light land. How admirably adapted 

 too would be these two products thus auxiliary to each other, turnips 

 and sheep, to the sandy lands in some of the counties along our 

 southern seaboard! In England, both Old and New^ instead of 

 leaving, as is done in some of the southern States, large numbers of 

 sheep to die off, of poverty and old age, breeding from the worst, and 

 to the last, and thus producing a diseased and rickety stock, they are 

 systematically sorted out, fattened at a given age, and handed over 

 to the butcher. 



The best sheep-masters in England fatten and sell off their ewes, 

 at four or at most five years old. It was the opinion of the celebrated 

 Mr. Ellman, a British farmer of high and liberal character, that 

 though an old ewe would bring a large lamb, yet such a lamb will 



