30 FINE WOOL SHEEP HUSBANDRY. 
and so far as this country is concerned tiey have re- 
ceived the distinctive name of Silesian Merinos. 
I will reserve a description of this flock, until the 
subject of importations of Merinos into the United 
States is specially considered. 
‘Introduction of Merinos into the United States. 
In 1798, William Foster, of Boston, Massachusetts, 
being on his return from a residence at Cadiz, in 
Spain, “with much difficulty and risk” got out of that 
kingdom, and brought home with him three Merino 
sheep—two ewes and one ram. Their fate was some- 
what characteristic of American knowledge of sheep 
at that time. Mr. Foster writes: “Being about to 
leave this country for France, soon after my arrival 
in Boston, I presented these sheep to Mr. Andrew 
Craigie, of Cambridge, who, not knowing their value 
at that time, ‘simply ate them,’ as he told me years 
after when I met him at an auction buying a Merino 
ram for $1,000.”* 
In 1801, Dupont de Nemours, the head of the com- 
mission appointed by the French government to select, 
in Spain, the large flock of Merinos given up by the 
latter by the treaty of Basle, together with a Mr. De- 
lessert, a Parisian banker, shipped four ram lambs to 
America, three of them intended for farms owned by 
those gentlemen in the United States, and the fourth 
* George Livermore, Esq., of Boston, writes me: “Mr. Foster is 
still living at the advanced age of nearly ninety years, and I have 
this day called on him, and heard from his own lips an aceount of his 
importation of Merino sheep substantially the same as that given 
above (January 20, 1862).” 
