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writings of his on this subject I came to the conclusion that 
he was absolutely unreliable. I do not want to suggest that 
Dr. Young writes things which he knows to be untrue, but 
he has accepted a number of vague statements, and he has 
stated as facts things which certainly are absolutely different 
from things which I know myself. And I always say that in 
any investigation of this sort authority is everything, and if 
you are not extremely rigid about quoting other people for 
facts of this sort you are likely to get saddled with all sorts 
of fancy stories, and you do not know where you are. Now 
there are various points which, as far as I could gather from 
Professor Wallace’s paper, were taken from Dr. Young, for 
instance, with regard to the so-called Tibetan sheep. I 
suppose I saw 100 tons of Tibetan wool in India, and there 
was not one black fleece in it, and though there are fine- 
woolled Tibetan sheep, the great majority of Tibetan sheep 
are kept as beasts of burden, and you might call their fleece 
hair rather than wool. Then he also spoke of the Afghan 
sheep being generally red in colour. Now anyone in India 
has seen any amount of Afghan sheep and lamb skins of 
various qualities; you can buy them from ten rupees up to 
500 rupees; and in not one among them have I seen anything 
at all of the character that we are accustomed to mean by 
Persian or Bokhara, or Crimean, or Astrachan lamb. My 
own impression, after having seen sheep in a great many parts 
of Asia, and after having studied Pallas, and all the other so- 
called authorities, is that I have never’ attempted to learn any- 
thing of any subject about which there was so extremely 
little accurate and reliable information available, because you 
must remember Pallas travelled nearly 150 years ago, and since 
his time hardly one line has been written by any man who knew 
more of the subject than an ordinary traveller might know 
about the innumerable breeds of sheep in Asia. Now an 
attempt has been made to distinguish between the so-called 
fat-tailed sheep and the so-called fat-rumped breeds, and no 
doubt they are extremely different. But when I asked Pro- 
fessor Wallace just now whether one of his rams which was 
shown on the screen was shown with the tail of the natural 
size, and he said it was, I felt sure that ram was just as much 
a mongrel as any which Dr. Young has introduced. If there 
is a pure-bred sheep in Asia I have not seen it, because I 
believe what is said of the inhabitants of Bokhara is true of 
all those tribes; they are all mongrels—the Mongolian, the 
Tibetan, and those in North China; I have seen those sheep 
in the possession of their owners, and there was not one of 
them in whose flocks I could ever see the slightest trace of 
care or selection. They seem to breed them as the Shetlanders 
