INFLUENCE OF TEQETATION. 



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fcteady-going habits so characteristic of the bulbous 

 bottomed Hollander. Subdued as they are by the na- 

 ture of their locality, they readily submit to man, who 

 tutors them at will, and works on them those profitable 

 changes from which have originated our improved va- 

 rieties. As connected with the unquiet dispositions of 

 hill sheep, I may mention the prevalence of a notion, 

 that domesticated sheep cannot by any possibility be- 

 come wild. From all that I have seen, and read, I 

 am led to believe, though the sheep, according to 

 Greek, Roman, and Oriental philosophers, was the 

 first animal domesticated, that when at liberty it will 

 soon return to its primitive and instinctive habits. Bon- 

 nycastle, in his work on Spanish America, remarks, 

 that sheep are found in a state of nature, in the northern 

 parts of New Spain, " having multiplied to an extra- 

 ordinary degree in the wide-spread plains, and savan- 

 nahs." In ascending our Scottish mountains, every 

 one must observe the state bordering upon wildness, in 

 which the sheep appear, roving in detached but well- 

 led parties ; bounding away to the most inaccessible 

 places on the approach of danger, and peering from the 

 eminences in all the pride of scornful independence. 

 Professor Blumenbach at one time doubted the possi- 

 bility of domestic sheep ever becoming wild ; but his 

 opinion was changed on perusing the work of Vincen- 

 tius, where there occurs a remarkable passage, in which 

 Nearchus, when speaking of the desert island of Cataia, 

 on the coast of Caramania, says, that the inhabitants 

 of the neighbouring islands yearly carried thither sheep, 

 as offerings to Venus and Mercury, and that, in course 

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