214 ROUGH WAYS MADE SMOOTH. 



indulging, much to the good farmer's vexation. With the 

 u cuteness " characteristic of their nation, the neighbours of 

 the Massachusetts farmer imagined it would be an excellent 

 thing if all his sheep were imbued with the stay-at-home 

 tendencies enforced by Nature upon the newly-arrived ram ; 

 and they advised Wright to kill the old patriarch of his fold 

 and instal the new Ancon ram in his place. The result 

 justified their sagacious anticipations. . . . The young 

 lambs were almost always either pure Ancons or pure 

 ordinary sheep. But when sufficient Ancon sheep were 

 obtained to interbreed with one another, it was found that 

 the offspring were always pure Ancon. Colonel Humphreys, 

 in fact, states that he was acquainted with only " one question- 

 able case of a contrary nature." By taking care to select 

 Ancons of both sexes for breeding from, it thus became easy 

 to establish an exceedingly well-marked race so peculiar that 

 even when herded with other sheep, it was noted that the 

 Ancons kept together. And there is every reason to believe 

 that the existence of this breed might have been indefinitely 

 protracted : but the introduction of the Merino sheep 

 which were not only very superior to the Ancons in wool and 

 meat, but quite as quiet and orderly led to the complete 

 neglect of the new breed, so that in 1813 Colonel Humphreys 

 found it difficult to obtain the specimen whose skeleton was 

 presented to Sir Joseph Banks. We believe that for many 

 years no remnant of it has existed in the United States.' 



It is easy, as Huxley remarks, to understand why, 

 whereas Gratio Kelleia did not become the ancestor of a 

 race of six-figured and six-toed men, Seth Wright's Ancon 

 ram became a nation of long- bodied, short-legged sheep. 

 If the purely hexadactylic descendants of Gratio Kelleia, 

 and all the purely hexadactylic members of the Colburn 

 family, in the third and fourth generations, had migrated 

 to some desert island, and had been careful not only to 

 exclude all visitors having the normal number of fingers 

 and toes, but to send away before the age of puberty all 

 children of their own which might depart in any degree 



