THE MOUFLON 49 



wards, in the other it is directed upwards. A head 

 from Sardinia in the possession of Mr. H. Brinsley 

 Brooke exhibits a similar perversion in the horn- 

 spiral ; and the same feature was displayed by a 

 mouflon living in the London Zoological Gardens 

 in 1911.^ I have been informed that horns of this 

 type are also occasionally seen in Corsican mouflon. 



The interest attaching to this variation is that 

 it represents a condition which is constant in the red 

 sheep ((9. orientalis) of Cyprus and South-western 

 Asia, as is more fully mentioned in a later chapter. 

 Despite this change in the direction of its summit, 

 the spiral of the right horn still remains right- 

 handed, and vice versa. 



Mouflon ewes may be either hornless or fur- 

 nished with small upright horns. The general 

 statements of sportsmen, so far as they are explicit 

 on the point, indicate that at least some Sardinian 

 ewes are hornless, but it remains to be proved 

 whether all in that island come under the same 

 category. If this should turn out to be the case, 

 the next point to ascertain would be whether all the 

 ewes in the other island are horned, or whether 

 only a percentage are thus furnished. If horned 

 ewes occur only in one of the two islands, whether 

 merely sporadically or generally, we should have 

 evidence of a racial distinction between the Sardi- 

 nian and the Corsican mouflon — a distinction which 



' R. I. Pocock, The Field, 191 1. 



D 



