informing a New Breed of SJiecp. 



219 



breeds would perish. This quality seems invaluable to the French 

 farmer, who is accustomed to cultivate no crop (either g-rasses or 

 roots) for his sheep, and hopes to find an animal that will live and 

 even fatten on nothing. An animal therefore which, as he hears, 

 lives in England on the bare and parched heights of the downs, 

 seems to him much likelier for his purpose than those balls of fat 

 and of wool which roll lazily as they fatten in the rich valleys of 

 Kent or Leicestershire. He would be right if any pure English 

 race could thrive in France, but of this experience has shown the 

 impossibility. 



This fact being established, we can consider English breeds 

 only with a view to crossing. Now as in crossing one gains but 

 in part the good qualities of the sire, we require, if the improve- 

 ment be sought from the sire, that he be of the most perfect type, 

 that so his influence may be greater, but his influence will be the 

 less both on shape and on wool in proportion as in those points he 

 comes nearer to the mother who is the base of the operation. By 

 employing, therefore, Southdown sires which are relatively inferior 

 in those points, we obtain less improvement than by blending with 

 either of the other two English breeds, while the difficulty remains 

 the same in rearing the lambs if we go beyond the first cross. Still 

 it may be said, you have not exhausted the subject by your many 

 and various trials with the three English breeds of which you 

 have spoken. The further question arises in looking for the new 

 animal we require, namely whether some French breeds be not 

 better suited for the purpose than others, whether the ill-success 

 of your experiments have not arisen from imperfect mothers rather 

 than from sires known to be perfect. But these trials have in fact 

 been made with different French breeds, yet with uniform disap- 

 pointment. 



While one is varying these experiments with rams of various 

 English breeds and ewes of various French breeds, years roll on 

 and time slips away. No one of course can expect to solve such 

 a question in the space of one life without making many such 

 trials at once. Hence arises a complication of care and of facts 

 to be registered with exactness, if one hopes to reach the light 

 through so many dark and narrow passages. It is on this difficult 

 ground that the writer has laboured for many a long year, acting 

 on opinions the most erroneous, led by the most varying opinions, 

 subject to mortifying mistakes, often losing almost every ray of 

 hope, and on the point of giving up all result from so much anxiety, 

 so many journeys, and so much expense. But it often happens that 

 the human mind harasses itself long in search of a thing which 

 might have been found easily by acting scrupulously upon laws 

 of nature that were already known, instead of groping in the dark 

 among accidental circumstances. 



Now, in all breeding, experimenters attach the greatest im- 



