CEOSS - BREEDING. 125 



the cross its present specific adaptation to a demand always 

 great in England and now rapidly increasing in the United 

 States. * The mutton is not injured, nay, for American tastes, 

 it is decidedly improved by the cross; hut the long-wool sheep 

 loses its size, its early maturity, its propensity to fatten, and 

 its great prolificacy in breeding. It loses the faultless form 

 of the English sheep, without even acquiring the knotty 

 compactness of the Merino. In short, in the expressive 

 common phrase, it becomes "neither one thing nor the other," 

 but only a comparatively valueless mongrel between two — for 

 their own separate objects — unimprovable breeds !f 



The cross between the Merino and the Down materially, 

 increases and improves the fleece of the latter. But it is held 

 to detract from the value of the mutton, and it seriously 

 impairs the value of the Down in aU the same particulars in 

 which it impairs the value of long-wools. 



All attempts to establish permanent intermediate varieties 

 of value by crosses between the Meriao and any family of 

 mutton sheep, with a view of combining the especial excel- 

 lencies of each, have ended in utter failure. Those with the 

 Down and the Ryeland seemed to promise best, J yet they 

 not only resulted in disappointment, but produced mongrels 

 incapable of being bred back to either of the English types. 



The Merino, owing doubtless to its greater purity of 

 blood compared with most other breeds, and to its vastly 

 greater antiquity of blood compared with any of them,§ 

 possesses a force and tenacity of hereditary transmission 

 which renders it a most unmanageable material in any cross 

 aiming at middle results. Its distinctive peculiarities are 



* The combination of a wool so pre-eminent for certain- necessary objects with 

 such valuable mutton properties, render these sheep one of those great gifts to man- 

 kind which it would seem almost wicked to tamper with I 



tl made some experiments in tliis cross — quite enough to satisfy me — in the 

 earlier part of my life. 



1 1 bred a few hundred South Down and Merino cross-breeds, many years ago, and 

 they- made a very pretty sheep. They were not much larger than the largest sized 

 Infantados of the present day— because, filled with Mr. Cline's ideas, I selected a very 

 small and excessively high-bred ram for the cross. He was bred by Francis Eotch, 

 Esq., and got by a prize ram of Mr. Ellman^s out of an Ellman ewe. 



§ The flne-wooled sheep of Spain are clearly traceable to a period anterior to the 

 Christian Era, on the authority of Strabo, Pliny and other Roman writers of conceded 

 veracity. Pliny was himself the Roman Procurator in Spain in the opening part of the 

 first century, and could speak from the result of his own observations. The often 

 re-published statement — that the breed was formed and subsequently perfected by 

 crossing these fine-wooled sheep with coarse, hairy, long-wooled Barbary rams, intro- 

 duced for that purpose by Columella, Pedro IVt of Castile, and Cardinal Ximenes — rests 

 on no sound historical proof, and is not credited by any recent intelligent writer on 

 sheep. It never was credited by men who were practically acquainted with the breed- 

 ing of Merino sheep. If these Barbary crosses are not altogether mythical, they 

 undoubtedly were made with, or first formed, the Chunahs, a long, coarse-wooled 

 breed of sheep which liave existed for ages in Spain. 



