408 
SHEEP AND WOOL. 
The longer the wool the less the number of these serratures 
in the inch, and the shorter the wool the greater the number. 
All the short wools are preferred for the cloth manufacture, 
and all the long wools for the worsted manufacture. We 
have instances of the use of wool for felting, which show 
that the process of felting has been known almost from time 
immemorial. As to other hairs, those of the stoat, the mouse, 
the sable, the rabbit, the dog, the cat, and the hare, almost 
all felt as well as the hairs or wool of others of the roclentia. 
I have sometimes suspected that this property of felting is 
not solely due to these serrations, these imbrications so 
clearly developed in the wool of some animals, for I have 
remarked that in all the cases of the best felting hairs you 
always see a kind of hole or cavity in the interior, which 
allows the hair to yield to pressure upon a part, and thus the 
hair becomes reduced to a third or half of its bulk by the 
process of felting. I throw this out as a hint to those inte¬ 
rested in the process. 
Now I wish to speak of the sources of wool. Everybody 
knows we take it from a sheep. What is a sheep? Can 
anybody tell me the difference between a sheep and a goat? 
Yes, you say. Then if you can tell me in a very few words 
you will confer a benefit on the naturalist. You find that the 
wild sheep run into the wild goats. The llama, the vicugna, 
the guanoco, the camel, and the dromedary are so closely 
allied that we are puzzled to know where camel begins and 
where alpaca ends. So it is with the sheep—there are wild 
sheep. There are the argali , which live in certain portions 
of Asia, distinguishable from our sheep ; and there is also 
the argali of America, the sheep which is called ovis moutani. 
Then there is a sheep which inhabits the Islands of Greece. 
It is very certain that the old sheep which we read of in the 
Bible was not a descendant of that American sheep in any 
way. Then the question is whether it descended from the 
argali of Asia, or the musimou of Crete or of Greece. There 
is considerable difficulty in getting at those lines of distinc¬ 
tion, and we speak then of our sheep as an independent 
species. Now the great and individual features of our sheep 
have been maintained through a long period of time. The 
sheep we have at the present time seem to be identical with 
the sheep of old. The sheep of Judea seem not to have 
differed from the sheep of the present day, and when we 
read in the Bible of the tending of sheep and their manage¬ 
ment, we feel that the sheep of that day were like the sheep 
of the present day, that their habits were the same, their 
domestication was the same, and their uses were the same 
