SAXON SHEEP. 84 



bled to keep large numbers of sheep, without infringing 

 much on their grain growing, and enabled to come in com- 

 petition with the wool-growers of other countries. As there 

 are no fences in that country, the sheep are attended by 

 dogs; One shepherd with his dog will manage from five 

 hundred to eight hundred in the summer, all in one flock." 



Mr. Carr, an English gentleman farmer, but now a resi- 

 dent of Germany, states the following in the Journal of the 

 ^ Royal Agricultural Society, of England. "These sheep 

 (Saxons) cannot thrive in a damp cliriiate, and it is quite 

 necessary that they should have a wide range of dry and 

 hilly pasture, of short and not over-nutritious herbage. If 

 allowed to feed oh swampy or marshy ground, even once or 

 twice, in autumn, they are sure to die of liver-complaint 

 (rot) in the following spring. They are always housed at 

 night, even in summer, except in the finest weather, when 

 they are sometimes folded in the distant fallows, but never 

 taken to pasture till the dew is off the grass. In the winter 

 they are kept within doors altogether, and are fed with a 

 small quantity of sound hay, and every variety of straw, and ■ 

 which is varied at each feed. Abundance of good water to 

 drink, and rock salt in their cribs, are indispensables." 



Baron Geisler has been many years one of the most suc- 

 cessful breeders of Saxon Merinos, and for a long time 

 (on the authority of Dr. Bright) " he has exercised un- 

 wearied assiduity by crossing and recrossing, so that by 

 keeping the most accurate registers of the pedigree of each 

 sheep, he has been enabled to proceed with a mathematical 

 precision in the regular and progressive improvement of the 

 whole stock. Out of seventeen thousand sheep, comprising 

 his flock, there is not one whose whole family he cannot 

 trace by reference to his books ; and he regulates his year- 

 ly sales by these registers. He considers the ■purity of 

 blood the first requisite towards perfection of the fleece." Dr. 

 Bright makes a few remarks on management. 



"For fourteen days before the coupling-season the rams 

 should be daily fed with oats, and this food should be con- 

 tinued not only during that particular period, but fpr fourteen 

 days after ; and one ram will thus be in a condition to serve 

 60 ewes, if other proper attentions have been paid to him 

 previously. 



" During the lambing period a shepherd should be con- 

 stantly day and night in the cote, in order that he may place 



8 



