FINE WOOL SHEEP HUSBANDRY. 165 
They also, unlike any other of our valuable domestic 
animals, exert a direct and observable influence in 
banishing coarse, wild, poor grasses from their pas- 
tures, and bringing in the sweeter and more nutritious 
ones.* 
Yet dairying is wholly driving out wool-growing in 
the grazing portions of our State, and grazing cattle 
are preferred to sheep on probably a majority of our 
grain farms. The remarkable decrease of the latter 
in proportion to our population is made apparent by 
the following table, compiled from the United States 
and State censuses. Mr. Kennedy, Superintendent of 
the United States Census office, has kindly furnished 
me with statistics of the census of 1860, in advance of 
their official publication: 
were partly overrun with blackberry and black and red raspberry 
bushes. I stocked the land heavily with sheep, The next year 
almost every bush was dead, most of them apparently untouched by 
the sheep, certainly bearing no marks of having been stripped of their 
bark. I had not dreamed of the sheep effecting any thing like sucha 
rapid and wholesale extermination ; but it was generally attributed to 
them, and no other cause for it could be even conjectured. Many of 
the bushes had been peeled by the sheep, and the extremities, buds, 
flowers, &c., nipped off. Sheep will frequently attack the elder (Sam- 
bucus Canadensis et pubescens) at particular periods of the year. In- 
deed, the tender leaves and buds of few bushes escape them. They 
attack some weeds, but banish more of them by manuring the land 
and increasing the growth of grass, so that the weeds are run out. 
Where the Canada thistle (Carduus arvensis) is not tall and rank, sheep 
will generally keep it from becoming so, where the land is not very 
rich, by nipping off the tops and the flowers. I do not know however 
that it meddles at all with the common thistle (C. lanceolatus). 
* They effect this principally through their superiority as manuring 
animals. I have used the term “valuable” domestic animals, for I 
suppose the goat would probably produce the same effect with the 
sheep, in these particulars. 
