discrimination was not felt. To the commission man or the buyer 

 this system perhaps did not offer great inconvenience. Perhaps the 

 buyer even counted it to his advantage as he is inclined to measure 

 the value of the whole offering by the inferior individuals in it. 

 But to the shipper who occasionally visited the market, little oppor- 

 tunity was presented by such a system to determine the preference 

 of buyers. This system gave way to one that is more orderly and 

 definite. The clay of the buyer taking "pot luck" on shipments as 

 a whole is over. Now they are sorted into the different classes and 

 grades and thus presented for the inspection of the buyer. The 

 result is an orderly and definite market by which the man who fol- 

 lows his shipments to sale may be enlightened, and from which 

 market quotations may be made that will be of aid to those that 

 have sheep to sell. 



With respect to control of receipts so that violent fluctuations 

 in prices do not occur within a very short space of time, the Chicago 

 market has greatly improved during the last twenty years. Until 

 the sheepmen of the west became fully recognized as specialists in 

 mutton production, treacherous and violent fluctuations were mat- 

 ters of almost daily occurrence. There are records of declines of 

 fifty cents per hundred weight in prices within an hour. The large 

 western shipper was obliged to forestall such ruinous conditions. 

 This was done by establishing feeding stations on the railway lines 

 tributary to Chicago from the west. Most of these are owned and 

 controlled by the railroad companies, altho a few are owned by 

 private parties. The large shipper consigns his sheep to some one 

 of these feeding stations and then awaits the advice of his commis- 

 sion firm as to the number of sheep and the time he shall send them 

 to market. A shipment of say twenty thousand sheep is thus dis- 

 tributed over a period of a week or ten days instead of all being 

 dumped on the market on the same day. Since from sixty-five to 

 seventy-five percent of the sheep reaching the Chicago market are 

 consigned first to the feeding stations, it can readily be seen how 

 much they aid in preventing market glutting. The record run of 

 sheep on the Chicago market for one day is little less than 60,000 

 and a run of 40,000 is considered very heavy, but were it not for 

 the feeding stations it is claimed that there would frequently be 

 days when the run would be from 60,000 to 100,000 head. 



