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182 
fond of being caressed, and unwilling to leave 
its protector to join its fellows of the flock. In 
countries where the shepherd guides his flock, 
and does not herd it by dogs in the manner 
practised in other places, the docility which the 
animals acquire is wonderfully great. Where 
the shepherd leads, they follow; they observe 
his motions and hear his voice,—and when he 
uses a pipe or horn, they listen to the well-known 
sound, and obey the signal. In the Alps of 
Switzerland, and in the mountainous parts of 
Italy, in Greece, and elsewhere, we are yet 
charmed with this remnant of pastoral simplicity 
and innocence. The shepherd boy knows all his 
little favourites, he remembers their names, 
and, when called, they leave the flock and come 
to him. When the numbers are great, he selects 
a few, teaches them their simple lesson, and they 
become the guides of the rest to their allotted 
pastures, and learn to collect the wanderers. 
The music of the mountain shepherd we find to 
be no poetic fiction. In the mountains of the 
South, we yet hear the soft and artless tones of 
his pipe. Inthe morning he leads forth his little 
flock, and plays as he marches at their head, and 
at sunset returns in like manner to the fold, 
where he pens them, that they may be kept from 
the wolves.”—{ Low’s Domesticated Animals. | 
The connexions of sheep with their shepherd 
in the open, arid, sparce, precipitous hill-pastures 
of the East, where beasts of prey abound, and 
deep, dark, unscaleable chasms of vast depth and 
danger in the rocky mountains are numerous,— 
their profound dependence on him for protection 
from the most terrible forms of death,—their fre- 
quent need of restoration by him, at the peril of 
his own life, from dismal solitudes into which 
they have wandered,—their following him to the 
most verdant pieces of the hills and to the banks 
of purling brooks,—their knowledge of his voice, 
their attachment to his person, and the tender 
care and caressing affection which he continu- 
ally renders them,—are beautiful and expres- 
sive emblems of the connexions of redeemed 
men with the Redeemer, —how they were all 
sought out by him in a waste and howling wil- 
derness, and carried back on his shoulders to a 
place of safety,—how he laid down his life to 
| save them, and took it again to tend them,—how 
he restores them to right paths, and leads them 
in green pastures and by still waters, and pro- 
tects them with his mace and staff,—how they 
all know his voice, and follow him, and will not 
listen to a stranger,—and how, eventually and 
for ever, he will feed them and “lead them unto 
living fountains of waters” in the better land. 
“T, even I,” said he, in reference to his ancient 
people, the mere types of his redeemed, “will both 
search my sheep and seek them out. As a shep- 
herd seeketh out his flock in the day that he is 
among his sheep that are scattered, so will I seek 
out my sheep and will deliver them out of all 
places where they have been scattered in the 
“SHEER 
cloudy and dark day, and will bring them to 
their own land, and feed them upon the moun- 
tains by the rivers, and in all the inhabited places 
of the country.” Multitudes, in fact, of the most 
graphic passages of the Bible, descriptive of the 
Divine goodness to men, both for time and for 
eternity, abound in allusions to the habits and 
character and treatment of the sheep flocks of 
the East ; and all, besides being exquisitely illus- 
trative of some of the most momentous truths of 
revelation, place these truths in a light of intense 
interest and wondrous beauty, to persons who 
have carefully observed even the mountain flocks 
of the sheep of our own land. 
Sheep were domesticated so early as the lifetime 
of the first man; and they make a somewhat con- 
spicuous figure in the earliest records of the old- 
est nations. “ Abel was a keeper of sheep;” and 
all the chief patriarchs, whose characters are 
sketched in the inspired record, were possessors 
and tenders of flocks. The sacred scriptures 
make historical mention of sheep from the earli- 
est times, through all the patriarchal ages, down 
to the epoch of the kings; and they often de- 
scribe flocks of them with a richness of colouring | 
and a minuteness of detail which identify the | 
pastoral usages of remote periods with the prac- | 
tices of the wandering shepherds of the East at 
the present day. “ Scarcely anything seems to 
have changed in the habits of men in those coun- 
tries of pastoral tribes. Where Abraham pitched | 
his tent, with his sheep and oxen and asses and 
camels,—where he sat at the door of his tent,— 
where the stone was rolled from the wells from 
which his maidens drew water,—there the Arab 
or the wandering Turcoman encamps, and all the 
scene is like a vivid panorama of the past. In 
the case of the present people of the Desert,— 
their tents, their journeyings, their household 
cares, their flocks, their camels, their wells,—all | 
inform us with what a matchless fidelity the Sa- | 
cred History has been told.” ‘The sheep figures | 
also in the earliest records of the nations of 
Southern Asia, on the oldest existing monuments 
of Western Asia, on the sculptured remains of an- 
cient Egypt, and in the symbols and memoranda 
of the earliest arts and sciences of the whole ci- 
vilized world. It was probably introduced to 
Southern and Eastern Europe, in some of its best 
or most improved Asiatic varieties, at the very 
dawn of European civilization; it was highly 
esteemed by the ancient Greeks, and is promi- 
nently and honourably mentioned by their his- 
torians and poets; it was introduced to Italy 
after the foundation of Rome; it probably.was 
introduced to Spain at an early period from 
Africa; and it seems to have become diffused 
throughout all western and central and north- 
eastern Europe at the period of the Roman con- 
quests. In recent times, it has commanded ra- 
pidly increasing attention; and at the present 
day, in the most highly improved agricultural 
countries of the world, it is more multitudinous, | 
