FINI) WOOL SHEEP HUSBANDRY. 30 
suits to be able to give much of his personal attention 
to breeding. His sheep improved, and were of good 
quality, but he established no distinct family, of special 
value, which has survived until the present time. 
In the same year with Mr. Livingston’s first im- 
portation (1802), Colonel Humphreys,* the American 
Minister in Spain, being about to return from that 
country, after an official residence in it of seven years, 
brought home with him a flock of Merinos. I quote 
the following statements from his “ Dissertation,” &c., 
addressed to the Massachusetts “Society for Promoting 
Agriculture” (August 25, 1802): 
“ Convinced that this race of sheep, of which, I be- 
lieve, not one had been brought to the United States 
until the importation by myself,+ might be introduced 
with great benefit to our country, I contracted with a 
person, of the most respectable character, to deliver to 
me, at Lisbon, one hundred, composed of twenty-five 
rams and seventy-five ewes, from one to two years old. 
They were conducted with proper passports, across 
the country of Portugal, by-three Spanish shepherds, 
and escorted by a small guard of Portuguese soldiers. 
On the tenth of April last they were embarked in the 
Tagus, on board the ship Perseverance, of 250 tons, 
Caleb Coggeshall, master. In about fifty days, twenty- 
one rams, and seventy ewes were landed at Derby, 
Connecticut, they having been shifted, at New York, 
* He was an aide-de-camp of Washington in the Revolution, and an 
inmate of his family at Mount Vernon from 1788 to1790. He was an 
elegant, learned, and public-spirited gentleman. 
+ Livingston said his own ‘arrived safely in the spring of 1802, and 
were, he believed, the first couples ever imported into the United 
States.” (Pref. to Dssay,) It is probable, therefore, Livingston’s 
arrived a little the earliest. The point is of mo consequence, but I am 
told it created some feeling in its day. 
