ORIGIN OF SOME DOMESTICATED ANIMALS 51 
we do not regard the arui as the parent stock. To which 
it may be replied that the latter species has smoother horns, 
with a curvature quite unlike those of any of the domesti- 
cated races, which approximate to the horns of the Corsican 
muflon. It seems somewhat difficult to believe that a 
long tail can have been developed from a short tail—as 
precisely the opposite development is the only one with 
which we are acquainted; but, nevertheless, it has been 
suggested that the long tails of the domesticated breeds 
are a kind of degenerate development. If this be sub- 
stantiated, there is no reason why the muflon—a European 
wild sheep, which in former times probably had a wider 
distribution—or some allied Asiatic species, should not have 
been the original progenitor of the domesticated breeds. A 
small breed of long-legged sheep, with somewhat goatlike 
horns, was in existence at the long-distant epoch when the 
inhabitants of the Swiss pile-villages flourished, and its 
descendants still survive in some of the more remote 
districts of the Swiss Alps, where the breed is known as 
the diindnerschafe. So far as it goes, this form suggests 
that the domesticated breeds are derived from an extinct 
species. Although domestic breeds were possessed by the 
ancient Egyptians, the sheep represented in the frescoes 
seems to be the wild arui. 
With domesticated goats the case is very different; it 
being practically certain that most, if not all, of the breeds 
of Europe and Western Asia are derived from the Persian 
wild goat, or pasang, which ranges from Asia Minor through 
Persia to Afghanistan and Sind. This handsome species 
has long scimitar-like horus, with the front surface forming 
a sharp ridge, instead of being flattened and knobbed, as 
in the ibex. Many domesticated breeds have very similar 
horns; but in others, especially from Central Asia, the 
