134 CKOSSIN^G ENGLISH AND LOCAL BEEEDS. 



become so adapted to their surroundings, that conditions 

 highly unfavorable to other sheep have become innocuous, if 

 jiot actually favorable to them. Yet these local families may 

 be iU adapted to meet the requisitions of the most accessible 

 mutton markets, or, indeed, of any mutton market. They 

 may be too small, too late in maturing, too indisposed to take 

 on flesh, fat, etc. In such cases, rams of an improved mutton 

 family — the family being selected with especial reference to 

 the demands of the particular market and the defects to be 

 counteracted in the local family — are put to the ewes of the 

 local family, and the produce, as is usual with half-bloods, 

 partakes strongly of the physical properties of the sire and yet 

 retains enough of the hardiness and local adaptation of the 

 dam to thrive and mature where the full-blood or high bred 

 grade of the superior family could not do so. But in all such 

 instances, the grower should stop with the first cross. If, 

 seduced by the beauty of that cross, he makes a second one 

 between the fuU-blood ram and the half-blood females, he ob- 

 tains animals very little better than their dams for the purposes 

 of mutton sheep, and decidedly less adapted to the local cir- 

 cumstances. Accordingly, some portions of the local family 

 should always also be bred pure by themselves, to furnish 

 females for the cross. This last course is generally pursued 

 among the breeders of England who make such crosses. 



It is wonderful that, with the highly successful example of 

 the English constantly before us, in the mode of cross-breeding 

 last described, it has not been more extensively resorted to 

 in the United States. In the heart of the mutton-growing 

 region on our Atlantic sea-board, there are very many locali- 

 ties which, by the poverty of the soil, by the severity of the 

 climate and the want of proper winter conveniencies, or by 

 these causes combined, are rendered unfit to sustain the large 

 English mutton breeds. But they sustain local varieties, or 

 in default of these, would sustain the coarse, hardy " common 

 sheep " of the country; and these bred to Down or Leicester 

 rams would produce lambs which, with a little better keep, 

 would sell, at four or five months old, for as much as the cost 

 of their dams, so that, if the fleece and manure would pay for 

 keeping, and if the number of lambs equaled that of the ewes 

 (always practicable with such sheep when not kept in large 

 numbers,) the net profit of 100 per centum would be annually 

 made on the flock.* 



* Mr. Thome, whose superb South Downs have been described, finds his lands 

 well adapted to the pure South Down, but his sheep of that family are too valuable 



