FAT-TAILED AND LONG-TAILED SHEEP 169 



diminish the volume of the naturally massive horns, 

 until they gradually disappear in one or both 

 sexes ; the Romanising of the nose . . . being a 

 further and hardly less uniform consequence of 

 domestication." 



The importance of this passage consists in the 

 recognition of the fact that the increase in the 

 calibre or length of the tail in many breeds of 

 sheep, and, it may be added, the deposition of 

 masses of fat on the bullocks of others, are purely 

 and simply effects of domestication, and that the 

 breeds in which they occur are derivatives from 

 ordinary short-tailed or medium-tailed sheep. 



The credit of being the first to recognise that 

 domestication is the cause of these features has 

 been given to Hodgson ; ^ but, as a matter of fact, 

 precisely similar views were promulgated twenty 

 years previously by Colonel Hamilton Smith,^ 

 who wrote as follows : — 



"The gradations in the scale of domestication 

 appear to be distinguishable, in the first place, by 

 a decrease of bulk in the horns, retaining the 

 original direction, or passing into more elongated 

 spiral turns ; by a partial retention of hair on 

 the body, more or less mixed with wool ; by the 

 local accumulation of fat on certain parts ; by the 



' See Darwin, Animals and Plants under Domestication, 2nd ed., 

 vol. i. p. 98. 



' In Griffith's Animal Kingdom, Mammalia, vol. iv. p. 325, 

 London, 1827. 



