14 SPANISH FAMILIES. 



both lambs and ewes. The latter were thought to produce 

 more wool than when each suckled a lamb. The lambs were 

 little over three months old when the spring migration 

 commenced, and about nine months old when the autumnal 

 one commenced. Thus every year of its life the migratory 

 Merino performed a journey of eight hundred miles, and 

 passed nearly a fourth of the entire time on the road. It 

 received neither shelter nor artificial food. Such a training 

 constantly weeded out of the flock the old, the feeble and the 

 weak in constitution, and developed among those which 

 remained capabilities for enduring exertion and hardship to 

 an extraordinary degree. 



Some of the most esteemed families of migratory Merinos 

 are thus mentioned by Lasteyrie: — "The Escurial breed is 

 supposed to possess the finest wool of all the migratory sheep. 

 The Gaudeloupe have the most perfect form, and are likewise 

 celebrated for the quantity and quality of their wool. The 

 Paulars bear much wool of a fine quality ; but they have a 

 more evident enlargement behind the ears, and a greater 

 degree of throatiness, and their lambs have a coarse, hairy 

 appearance, which is succeeded by excellent wool. The 

 lambs of the Infantados have the same hairy coat when 

 young. The Negretti are the largest and strongest of all the 

 Spanish traveUng sheep." 



Vague and unsatisfactory as is this description, it is 

 perhaps the best contemporaneous one extant, of that period 

 near the opening of the present century when the flocks of 

 Spain had reached their highest point of excellence — and 

 before invasion and civil war had led to their sale into foreign 

 countries and their almost general destruction or dispersion 

 at home. I am inclined to think that the small pains taken 

 by Lasteyrie and his contemporaries to point out the distinc- 

 tions between the best Spamsh families, — the "Leonesa" as 

 they were collectively called — resulted from the fact, that the 

 foreign breeders of that day, and the Spaniards themselves, 

 attached but little importance to those distinctions in respect 

 to value — though in respect to breeding they were rigorously 

 preserved. 



To furnish the reader with some data for comparison 

 between the several Spanish families and their American 

 descendants, I select the following facts from a table prepared 

 by Petri, an intelligent and highly trustworthy writer, who 

 visited Spain near the beginning of this century on purpose 

 to examine its Sheep ; and I add some measurements of 



