CHAPTER III. 



INTRODUCTION OF THE SPAMSH MERINO SHEEP. 



The improvement of American sheep and wool, fiue-wooled sheep- 

 breeding and wool-growing, and the rise and establishment of the fine- 

 wooled manufactures, began with the introduction of the Merino breed 

 of Spain. That beautiful country of a blessed climate has long been 

 distinguished for its sheep. The early writers on agriculture describe 

 various breeds of sheep as existing in Spain ; they were of different 

 colors black, red, and tawny. The black sheep yielded a fine fleece, 

 the finest of that color then known ; but the red fleece of Boetica 

 Granada and Andalusia was of still superior quality, and, as Pliny 

 remarks " had no fellow." This fine-wooled sheep is thought to have 

 left its primitive home in Asia Minor, and following the line of civiliza- 

 tion been introduced successively into Greece, Italy, and along the 

 shores of the Mediterranean to Spain, receiving in each country for 

 many centuries great care and improvement, culminating finally in the 

 establishment of the finest wooled breed of the world. Columella, 

 Pliny, and others, before the Christian era and many since, have writ- 

 ten and are now writing on the subject, and it would be a difficult task 

 to contribute any new material or to put the old into a new garb. Nor 

 can a good excuse be made for the attempt when such excellent authori- 

 ties and charming writers as Youatt, Low, Livingston, and others have 

 put within our reach clear and scholarly chapters. Youatt believes 

 that they were imported from Italy and that they were of the Tarentine 

 breed, which had gradually spread from the coast of Syria and the 

 Black Sea, reaching Spain before the Christian era. Here they made 

 great improvement and were the objects of the greatest care. The best 

 of these sheep were the Transhumantes or migratory ones those which 

 passed the summer in the mountains of the north, and the winter on 

 the plains toward the south of Spain. How the great improvement has 

 been made which produced this unrivaled sheep history does not in- 

 form us. The excellency of the Merinos consists in the fineness and 

 felting property of their wool and in the weight of it yielded by each 

 individual sheep ; the closeness of that wool and the luxuriance of the 

 yolk, which enables them to support extremes of cold and wet quite as 

 well as any other breed; the ease with which they adapt themselves 

 to every change of climate, and thrive and retain, with common care, 

 all their fineness of wool under a burning tropical sun and in the frozen 



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