American Live stock. 
461 
recent importation by several of our enterprising Americans from 
the royal flocks of France, Saxony and Silesia, upon the earlier 
Merino ewes, but by our own flock-masters at home, so that at this 
day, no fine-wool sheep in the world excel, and few equal, the Amer¬ 
ican Merinos in the heavy products of their fleeces, or the size and 
stamina of their bodies. We might examine the statistics of their 
annual production, aggregating millions of dollars in value, did op¬ 
portunity permit, but we may rest content with the general facts 
which have been stated, and the progress we have made in their 
cultivation, not only in the fine wool but in the other varieties. 
The Coarser-wooled Mutton-sheep., so successfully bred in Eng¬ 
land during the last seventy years, we have for the past thirty years 
adopted by frequent importations. They have been successfully 
propagated in their own purity of blood, and by their crosses on the 
common flocks, raised our inferior ones to a value hitherto unknown 
in their kind. We have now the Bakewell, or Leicester, the Cots- 
wold, and Lincoln, all of the most valuable long-wool varieties. 
We have also the Southdown, the Shropshire and Oxford Downs of 
the middle wools, abundant in fleece, massive in the quantity and 
delicious in the excellence of their flesh, so that Americans may, 
within the next decade or two, become, as they have never yet be¬ 
come, a partially mutton-consuming people, and ship thousands of 
dressed carcasses to Britain, as is now done with our fresh beef. 
SWINE. 
In the category t)f other domestic animals brought into our coun¬ 
try with the earlier immigrants, came also this animal, indispensable 
for domestic consumption, constituting an important item in our 
exports abroad. From the earliest history, swine have been con¬ 
nected with farm husbandry, as well as untamed rangers of the 
forest, in which latter condicion they even now exist in some of the 
uncultivated sections of the eastern continent. To what degree of 
perfection, or even improvement, they were cultivated in ancient 
times, history gives us little or no account; but we do know that 
for many years previous to the present century, and for some years 
since, the common swine of the United States were inferior in the 
quality of their flesh, ungainly in form, slow in arriving at maturity, 
and repulsive in almost every phase of their character as compan¬ 
ions to our other agricultural stock. Yet in eastern Asia, and in 
