CHAPTER III 



THE MOUFLON, OR WILD SHEEP OF EUROPE, 

 AND ITS FORERUNNERS 



When the great Swedish naturalist Linnaeus wrote 

 his Systema Natures in the middle of the eighteenth 

 century, he appears to have been ignorant of the 

 existence of a wild sheep in the islands of Sardinia 

 and Corsica ; and it was therefore not till some 

 years later that this mouflon, as it is called by the 

 French — the musmon or musimon of the natives 

 of Sardinia and Corsica — received a scientific 

 name ; the designation Ovis musimon having been 

 given to this species by the German naturalist 

 Schreber in 1795. At a later period it was thought 

 that the mouflon differed in certain important 

 structural features from domesticated sheep — 

 the typical representatives of the genus Ovis — and 

 it was accordingly referred to a genus by itself, 

 under the name of Caprovis. Subsequent investi- 

 gations showed, however, that this supposed 

 difference is non-existent ; and there are good 

 grounds for regarding the mouflon as the ances- 

 tral stock from which some of the European tame 

 breeds have taken origin. If it could be definitely 



