270 QUEENSLAND AGRICULTURAL JOURNAL. [1 Sepr., 1599. 
one descended at the same time. The wages of shepherds and of peons generally 
ranged from 10 dollars to 80 dollars (head shepherd’s pay) per month. Taking 
the dollar to be worth 8s., though subject to the fluctation in the price of 
silver, this would mean in English currency pay at the rate of from £1 10s. to 
£4 10s. per month. As a rule, on a large estancia there are about 20 peons 
permanently employed. 
In Queensland there is, at the present day, no shepherding, the sheep being 
all run in paddocks. But boundary riders are required, which, in point of 
wages, amounts to about the same thing, except that a larger number of sheep 
ean be placed in charge of a boundary rider than of a shepherd. 
The cost of managing asheep run in Queensland is, as nearly as possible, 
£100 per 1,000 sheep per year; hence a run with 250,000 sheep would cost the* 
owners £25,000 a year to carry on. 
As for an increase of 100,000 lambs from 250,000 sheep, this is far in 
excess of our Queensland increase. On a sheep run in good working order, 
there will be about one-third breeding ewes, and in a good season 8V per cent. 
of lambs is all we can expect. In very favourable seasons the percentage will 
reach and sometimes exceed 90 per cent., that is, of course, on the one-third 
ewes of the flock. 
THE PRINCIPLES OF SHEEP-BREEDING. 
No. 3. 
By HERMANN SCHMIDT. 
_ Men have originally employed the skins, and later on the hair, of animals for 
the purposes of clothing. Whilst the different sorts of hair are more or less 
suitable for that purpose, according to their length, fineness, softness, &c., they 
all possess, being of a horny nature, the peculiarity of being non-conductors of 
temperature, thus serving the purpose of, to some extent, preventing the 
radiation of the animal heat, and, by so doing, of keeping the animal body in 
comfortable temperature. In the course of time, the wild animals which yielded 
the most suitable skins for clothing purposes became so scarce that it became 
necessary to obtain substitutes for such skins. This probably led to the domes- 
tication of such animals as produced the most suitable kinds of hair—vyiz., 
vicunas, goats, and sheep, of which the latter has become the most useful to 
man. Of sheep we have a very great variety. Some of them produce no wool, 
but short, coarse hair. These are mostly found in hot tropical countries, where 
clothing is not so much required as it is in cold latitudes. Hence it is here 
that we find sheep carrying plenty of wool. ‘The several classes of domesticated 
sheep may, according to the nature of their hair or wool, be divided into—1st, 
those that produce hair only; 2nd, those that yield a mixture of hair and down; 
8rd, those that produce down only. : 
Most of the uncultivated breeds of domestic sheep carry hair and down. 
The Lincolns, Cotswolds, &¢ . and the French and German country sheep carry 
highly cultivated hair only; whilst the fleeces of the merino may be looked upon, 
as I shall explain more fully directly, as cultivated down. 
Taking the first-mentioned class as the progenitors of our domestic sheep— 
z.¢., the mixed woolled ones, carrying hair and down—we have reasons to believe 
that the long-woollen races were developed from them through paying special 
attention to the perfecting of the hair, and through getting rid of the down; 
whilst with the merinos the opposite system has been followed—viz., the culti- 
vation of the down, the lengthening of its staple, rendering it more dense, and 
by persistently culling out, year after year, animals with an admixture of hair 
in their fleeces, just as we do at the present day. 
Considering now that the wool of a Lincoln sheep is much coarser, in the 
ordinary meaning of the word, than that of many other animals, the question 
arises: Where is the line to be drawn between wool and hair, and which are the 
peculiarities that distinguish the one from the other ? 
