EARLY HISTORY AND NAMES 3 



Sheep accordingly means the animal that requires 

 to be carefully tended or guarded, in opposition to 

 cattle, which are better able to take care of them- 

 selves. It may be added that this Sanskrit origin 

 of the name is of itself a proof that some at least 

 of the domesticated sheep of Europe trace their 

 ancestry to an Eastern source. 



Here it may be mentioned as a somewhat 

 remarkable fact that the Italian name for a sheep, 

 instead of being derived from ovis, is una pecora, 

 a derivative from the Latin pecus, plural pecora, 

 signifying cattle generally. A very similar usage 

 occurs in the case of the Gr&ck. probaton, generally 

 employed in the plural, probata, which signifies 

 any animal that walks with the head forwards, 

 and then all kinds of cattle, as opposed to man. 

 Later on, however, the name became restricted 

 to sheep and goats, and in the Attic dialect almost 

 exclusively to the former. In Hebrew the word 

 tz6n is employed for sheep collectively, and seh 

 for a single sheep or a goat. 



As in the case of most domesticated animals, 

 special names are assigned to the two sexes of the 

 sheep, and likewise to the young. 



For the adult male we have ram, which is 

 common to English, Anglo-Saxon, and Friesian, 

 and equivalent to the German ramm; while it is 

 allied to the Old Norse and Icelandic rammr or 

 ramr and the Swedish and Gothic ram, signifying 



