476 Twenty Years' Changes in our Foreign Meat Supplies. 
Sheep Imported from : — 
1869. 
1877. 
1883. 
1886. 
Holland 
Denmark (including Iceland) . . 
TTnit.i-rl Sf-ntps 
Total .. .. 
(000 omitted.) 
289 
265 
140 
4 
io 
(000 omitted.) 
263 
478 
61 
43 
10 
13 
4 
(000 omitted.) 
214 
488 
90 
125 
94 
89 
13 
(000 omitted.) 
467 
338 
3 
121 
94 
6 
8 
708 
872 
1,113 
1,037 
The bulk of our supply thus remains of European origin. 
The Transatlantic supply, including both the exports of Canada 
and of the United States, appeared for the first time in 1876, and 
almost immediately reached what seems by the experience of 
the past decade to have been its maximum, in 1879, when 
193,000 head of sheep were sent to us from the two countries, 
three-fifths of the whole being from the United States. The total 
declined to 116,000 head in 1881, but rose again, as the above 
table shows, to 183,000 head in 1883, when the United States 
took only the second place in this trade, and the traffic imme- 
diately fell off under the influence of existing prices to about 
one-half its former total dimensions, the export from the United 
States last year being quite insignificant. In the course of 1887 
the collapse of this source of import seems more marked than 
ever. The United States did not send us so much as a single 
sheep in August last, or a whole thousand since the year began. 
The Canadian quota also was in the first eight months of 1887 
but one-third of what it was in the same period of 1886. 
The result will surprise no one who has noticed the position 
that the sheep holds in America. In the United States, in 
the same twenty years which have seen the marvellous develop- 
ment of horned stock that has covered the ranches of the West 
with cattle, and doubled their number in this short interval, this 
increase of over 100 percent, in cattle has to be contrasted with a 
net gain of only about 10 per cent, in sheep. The omission of 
lambs from the decennial census enumeration, and their inclusion 
in the later figures of the Agricultural Department at Washing- 
ton, have sometimes obscured this slow rate of advance. It 
ought not to be as little noticed as it is that since 1883 the 
sheep stock of the United States has declined by well-nigh 
6,000,000 head. In Canada an advance, no doubt, has oc- 
curred, though its exact dimensions are not easily ascertainable on 
account of defective statistics at the contrasted dates ; but I can 
bear personal testimony to the fact that one of the first features 
