SCIENCE AND ART OF BREEDING. 105 



of their work as a study for us to learn the special habits of 

 those aboriginal parents of the human race. The facts we 

 learn in this and other ways all go to prove that the im- 

 provement of the sheep dates back to unknown centuries, 

 thousands of years, and since that ancient time we have the 

 best reasons to know that there have been constant and sue 

 cessful attempts to improve the race of domesticated sheep, 

 by selection and breeding the selected animals, so selected 

 for their better form, more valued fleece, and general im- 

 proved habits and conditions. And thus we have to-day dis- 

 tinct types of sheep varying as to locality, climate, and the 

 kind of people who bred and reared them. And we may be 



ROCKY MOUNTAIN SHEEP. 



sure that this process of improvement began with the most 

 ancient races of mankind, and that these ancient, even pre- 

 historic shepherds, knew something about the art of breeding, 

 and so necessarily something of the science, as we distin- 

 guish it, of breeding sheep. We have an example of this 

 fact in the shrewd conduct of one of the earliest recorded 

 breeders, Jacob, who kept his father-in-law's flocks in that 

 great pastoral region known as Midian, who by devices, 

 doubtless well known to the shepherds of those days, so in- 

 fluenced the nervous functions of the ewes, as to bring 

 lambs marked in a peculiar way by which he secured a 

 questionable advantage over his old father-in-law. We can- 

 not doubt that these old shepherds knew a good deal about 



