FINE WOOL SHEEP HUSBANDRY. 143 
A. defect may be an individual or family one. The 
latter is far nore likely to be transmitted to the pro- 
geny. The other sometimes appears to be accidental, 
and is not forcibly transmitted. I would rather breed 
from a slightly defective animal from a very perfect 
family, than from a very perfect animal from a slight- 
ly defective family. 
The obstinacy with which family peculiarities are 
sent down to remote generations, finds constant exemn- 
plifications. Do we not, in the red and tawny and 
occasionally black spots which appear on the legs, 
ears, and even bodies of new born Merino lambs, find 
traces of the fine-wooled flocks of those colors in 
Spain, described ages ago by Strabo, Pliny and 
Columella? Between 1824 and 1826 David Ely, of 
Pompey, N. Y., purchased an imported Saxon ram 
of surprising individual excellence, but marked with 
this peculiarity: his ears were not half the length or 
breadth of the normal ear.* He transmitted the same 
peculiarity to his offspring, and they retransmitted it. 
I have seen’ animals of the fifteenth or twentieth cross 
away from these “little eared sheep,” as they are 
called—that is, no ram possessing that characteristic 
was used in all those crosses—and yet the peculiarity 
was fully preserved. I have seen large, coarse-wool- 
ed mutton sheep, with Mr. Ely’s Saxon blood nearly 
all bred out, arithmetically speaking, carrying the 
* I think Mr. Grove told me that this peculiarity first originated 
accidentally or as a monstrosity in Saxony, but that as it occurred on a 
very superior animal, the owner continued to breed from him and his 
descendants. They failed, however, to obtain a permanent standing, 
as their ears did not admit of either of the German systems of num- 
bering on those members. 
