470 



Wool Prices in 1899. 



hardly, however, be called an average. It is believed to rest 

 only on the mean of three separate quotations of wool prices, 

 two Colonial and one English, being deduced from a 

 comparison of the prices of what is described as good Victorian 

 s:oured, superior Cape scoured, and English South Down 

 wool, and no doubt it may be a question for experts 

 whether the selection is sufficiently typical. Certainly 

 such an advance would not have been established if 

 other sections of our wool supplies were equally included in 

 the purview. Even limited to the market values of the three 

 wools named, a little enquiry shows that the rise was 50 

 per cent in the two Colonial grades, but under 28 per cent, 

 in the English variety quoted, and. whatever may have 

 been the practice at one time, it is probably no longer safe 

 to take South Down wools as typical of our home 

 produce generally, and the increase of from g^d. to njd. 

 per lb. in this section was probably much greater than 

 the whole transactions of the year would have shown. 

 Moreover such rise as there seems to have been came so late 

 in the year that a considerable bulk of the home clip of 

 Down wool must have passed from the producers' hands 

 before the advance occurred. All these considerations lessen 

 the full effect of the rise even in finer varieties of Down wool, 

 when they eventually did move, as a consequence of the 

 diminished supplies of the merino varieties of imported 

 wool which were assiduously run after in the past season. 



There are not, perhaps, available any very exact estimates 

 of the relative bulk of the wool of the various breeds of the 

 United Kingdom, and there are certainly no public or 

 authoritative records of the prices which they respectively 

 secure, or even of the average value of British wool as a 

 whole, like those by wmich we can measure the average price 

 of British grain. Speaking broadly, we know, as was shown 

 some years ago in this Journal,* that of the i2lbs. of wool 

 assumed to be used in a year by each unit of our population, 

 only about 3lbs. is home grown at all, and both the 9lbs. of 

 foreign or colonial produce and the 3 lbs. of domestic pro- 

 duction embrace under the common term of " wool " an almost 



* Vol. III. No. 2. 1896. 



