230 DOMESTICATED ANIMALS AND PLANTS 
It cannot fail to occur to the reader that the wild and inacces- 
sible mountain regions and high plateaus of central and southern 
Asia have afforded a unique retreat for multitudes of the wild 
relatives of the larger of our domestic animals,! and that to a 
similar but less extent the mountain regions of Africa and of 
western America, both to the north and the south, have served 
the same significant purpose. 
The domestic sheep are, roughly speaking, of four distinct 
classes: first, the horned varieties like the Merino and the Dor- 
set, resembling most closely the nearest wild relatives ; second, 
the common hornless and coarse-wooled breeds of England and 
America, such as the Shropshire, Lincoln, Cotswold, Leicester, 
and Southdown ; third, the so-called fat-tailed sheep of south- 
western Asia and northeastern Africa, in some strains of which 
the tail often reaches a weight of forty or fifty pounds and drags 
upon the ground, while in others, with shorter tails, the enormous 
amount of fat occurs in the rump ;? fourth, a minor strain be- 
longing to Iceland and remarkable for the fact that, like the 
Cyprian wild sheep, its horns are not limited to two, but, ac- 
cording to Youatt, may be three or any other number, odd or 
even, up to as many as eight. 
It must be clear to the student that there is no dearth of 
evidence in nature for the domestication of sheep, and that, even 
yet, should all our common breeds be lost, they could be sub- 
stantially restored from new material out of the truly wild. The 
greatest change made in domestication would seem to have 
1 It is difficult to realize that this “ roof of the world” — this high and broken 
interior with its forbidding mountainous southern wall, in most places almost 
uninhabitable by man and hence practically given over to the wild — is not a 
small area, but rather a region of vast extent, not less than two thousand miles 
across. When this is fully realized it will not seem so strange that almost 
everything traces to a wild counterpart in “ central Asia.” It is the great left- 
over and uncivilized part of the world. 
2 This fat is exceedingly soft, more like marrow than tallow, and is often 
spread directly on bread and eaten as butter. It is the skins of the young 
lambs of these sheep that constitute the astrakhan of commerce, and it is their 
intestines from which the Germans make the so-called catgut for the violin 
and other small stringed instruments. 
