EAST OF THE^ MISSISSIPPI RIVER. 699 



In 1890 the States east of the Mississippi, with an area of 852,000 

 square miles, pastured 17,000,000 sheep, or an average of 20 to the 

 square mile; the British Isles, with an area of about 120,000 square 

 miles, had 27,000,000 sheep, or 225 to the square mile. Were the coun- 

 try east of the Mississippi as densely stocked as Great Britain it would 

 support 191,700,000 sheep, or nearly 12 where it now carries 1, and 

 would raise nearly or quite 1,200,000,000 pounds of wool, or over 19 

 pounds per head for each inhabitant of the United States, or four times 

 the requirement for clothing and other uses to which wool is put. 

 There is no reason, physical or otherwise, why this cannot be done. 

 There is no breed of sheep of any value that cannot find here a con- 

 genial home, be it on the low sandy soil of some parts of the South, 

 or on the table lands and lofty peaks of the Appalachian system. In- 

 deed, under proper treatment, most breeds improve here. American 

 sheep husbandry is yet in its infancy, and we are not willing to admit 

 that the breeders of the present day cannot improve upon the mutton 

 sheep we now have as successfully as their fathers improved upon the 

 old Spanish Merino, to which the preceding pages bear ample testi- 

 mony. This great improvement can at least be paralleled; it may be 

 excelled. 



All improvement heretofore made has been by individual enterprise, 

 much of it blindly directed. Although the National Government has 

 for many years maintained gardens for the propagation of foreign seeds 

 and plants, mostly ornamental, and has expended hundreds of thou- 

 sands of dollars in the dissemination of common seeds and plants, it has 

 not yet risen to the necessity of improvement of our live stock by the 

 establishment of breeding farms. Our law makers have been bound 

 to the theory which looked upon all breeding experiments as beyond 

 the province of Government and outside the pale of its constitutional 

 powers. Recently patriotic men, rising above party tradition, have 

 passed through Congress an act creating agricultural experiment sta- 

 tions in each State and appropriating large sums of money for their 

 maintenance. 



This is a step in the right direction. As yet, these stations have 

 mainly occupied themselves in analyzing commercial fertilizers and 

 duplicating each the other's work, or, as remarked by the Assistant 

 Secretary of Agriculture, "they are thrashing a great deal of old straw 

 for want of the information that it has been thrashed before." Three 

 or four of them have conducted interesting and highly valuable feeding 

 experiments with sheep, and one, at least, Wisconsin, recognizing the 

 great importance of sheep industry, offers no excuse for devoting many 

 pages of its annual report to investigations on feeding sheep and notes 

 on cross-breeding. This is practical work of the highest value, and 

 should be extended. Breeding farms should be connected with the 

 stations and patient experiments made to determine the breed of sheep 

 especially fitted for the climatic and economic conditions of the locality, 



