170 PRODUCTION OF THE SEXES AMONG SHEEP. 
and the number of ewes in heat being diminished, the ram 
also found less weakened, the procreation of males in 
majority again commenced. 
In order to show that the cause of such a result is isolated 
from all other influences, of a nature to be confounded with 
it, I shall take the years 1855-6, in which, by the effect of 
a degree of equilibrium of age and vigour between the rams 
and ewes, the male and female births were found, relatively 
with each other, nearly upon a par in numbers, being 25 
males to 23 females. 
Other results have furnished two remarkable facts : 
1st. The ewes that have produced the female lambs are, 
on an average, of a weight superior to those that produced 
the males; and they evidently lose more in weight than these 
last, during the suckling period. 
2d. The ewes that produce males weigh less, and do not 
lose, in nursing, so much as the others. 
If the indications given by these facts come to be confirmed 
by experiment sufficiently repeated, two new laws will be 
placed by the side of that which Giron de Bazareingues has 
determined by his observations and experiments. 
On the one hand, as, at liberty or in the savage state, it is 
a general rule that the predominance in acts of generation 
belongs to the strongest males, to the exclusion of the weak, 
and as such a predominance is favourable to the procreation 
of the male sex, it would follow that the number of males 
would tend to surpass incessantly that of the females, 
amongst whom no want of energy or power would turn aside 
from generation; and the species would find in it a fatal 
obstacle to its reproduction. But, on the other hand, if it 
was true that the strongest females, and the best nurses 
amongst them, produce females rather than males, nature 
would thus oppose a contrary law, which would establish the 
equilibrium, and, by an admirable harmony, would secure the 
perfection and preservation of the species, by confiding the 
reproduction of either sex to the most perfect type of each 
respectively .—Irish Weekly Agricultural Review. 
