134 CROSSING ENGLISH AND LOCAL BEEEDS. 



become so adapted to their surroundings, that conditio! 

 highly unfavorable to other sheep have become innocuous, 

 not actually favorable to them. Yet these local families ma 

 be ill adapted to meet the requisitions of the miost accessibi 

 mutton markets, or, indeed, of any mutton market. The 

 may be too small, too late in maturing, too indisposed to tal 

 on flesh, fat, etc. In such cases, rams of an improved mutto 

 family — the family being selected with especial reference 1 

 the demands of the particular market and the defects to l 

 counteracted in the local family — are put to the ewes of tl 

 local family, and the produce, as is usual with half-blood 

 partakes strongly of the physical properties of the sire and yi 

 retains enough of the hardiness and local adaptation of tl 

 dam to thrive and mature where the full-blood or high bre 

 grade of the superior family could not do so. But in all sue 

 instances, the grower should stop with the first cross. I 

 seduced hj the beauty of that cross, he makes a second or 

 between the full-blood ram and the half-blood females, he o' 

 tains animals very little better than their dams for the purposi 

 of mutton sheep, and decidedly less adapted to the local ci 

 cumstances. Accordingly, some portions of the local famil 

 should always also be bred pure by themselves, to fumis 

 females for the cross. This last course is generally pursue 

 among the breeders of England who make such crosses. 



It is wonderful that, with the highly successful example < 

 the English constantly before us, in the mode of cross-breedin 

 last described, it has not been more extensively resorted 1 

 in the United States. In the heart of the mutton-growir 

 region on our Atlantic sea-board, there are very many local 

 ties which, by the poverty of the soil, by the severity of tl 

 climate and the want of proper winter conveniencies, or I 

 these causes combined, are rendered unfit to sustain the larj 

 English mutton breeds. But they sustain local varieties, i 

 in default of these, would sustain the coarse, hardy " commc 

 sheep " of the country; and these bred to Down or Leicesti 

 rams would produce lambs which, with a little better kee 

 would sell, at four or five months old, for as much as the co 

 of their dams, so that, if the fleece and manure would pay f 

 keeping, and if the number of lambs equaled that of the ewi 

 (always practicable with such sheep when not kept in larj 

 numbers,) the net profit of 100 per centum would be annual 

 made on the flock.* 



* Mr. Thorne, whose saperb South Downs have been described, finds his Ian 

 wel} adapted to the pnre Soatb Down, bat his sheep of tliat family are too valnal 



