

PREFACE. 



So full and complete is the exposition of the subject as discussed 

 in the fiollowing pages, and so clearly are the scope of the work and 

 the circumstances which prevailed with its accomplished author, to 

 pass it through our hands to the public, explained in his own " Intro- 

 duction," that only in compliance with a common custom in book- 

 making, might any thing have been deemed necessary in the way of 

 preface ; were it not to acquit ourselves of the obligation to tender 

 thus publicly to Col. Randall, not our own thanks merely, but those 

 of the agricultural community, for the great benefit which must ens-ue 

 to it, in the proportion that this instructive contribution to the stock 

 of our agricultural knowledge and literature may command the atten- 

 tion to which it is, on every account, so well entitled. 



An agricultural correspondence, reaching far back, and spreading 

 widely over the Southern States, to which has been more recently 

 added considerable extent of personal observation, had with us, 

 already established the conviction, that in no other part of our coun- 

 try, perhaps, does there exist a resource at once so fruitful, and so 

 little availed of, as that which is possessed in that region, for the pro- 

 secution of this — one of the most interesting and important branches 

 of Husbandry that any country can enjoy. 



But while it has been easy to perceive this defect so apparent in their 

 agricultural economy, amounting in the aggregate to a national loss 

 of no inconsiderable magnitude ; it was not so easy to expose, as 

 Col. Randall has done, the fallacy of the difficulties that were sup- 

 posed to stand in the way, or to indicate how the real impediments 

 which do exist may be overcome, or materially mitigated. 



Something of these imaginary difficulties, for successful Sheep 

 Husbandry, may, as we believe, be assumed to have their origin in the 

 prejudices engendered in the minds of Southern agriculturists, by the 

 sweeping condemnation of it to be found in the celebrated and deserv- 

 edly popular essays of Arator, by Col. John Taylor — clarum vene- 

 rahile nomen! and it may be that these prejudices are referable in a 

 degree, also, to the concurrent opinions of the no less celebrated John 

 Randolph, " of Roanoke," who, even on the floor of Congress, gave 

 thorn utterance in vehement and bitter denunciation against the harm- 





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