Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: of crossing between varieties and the effects of in-and- in breeding; the proper mode of selecting a flock; the art of breeding; the present course of breeding in the United States; and suggestions as to the future of the fine wool husbandry in our country. The Spanish Merino. The origin of this animal is involved in obscurity. The commonly received account is, that Columella, a Roman, who resided near Cadiz, in the reign of Claudius, coupled fine wool Tarentian (Italian) ewes with wild rams brought from Barbary, and thus laid the foundation of the breed; that some thirteen centuries after, Pedro IV. of Castile, improved it by a fresh importation of rams from the same country; and that two hundred years later still, Cardinal Ximenes a third time repeated this ameliorating cross ;—from which period, we are left to infer, the breed became established about as it was found when it first began to attract the special attention of foreign nations in the seventeenth century. All the early varieties of Africa had long, straight, hairy wool, like the present long-wooled sheep of England, and no writer, ancient or modern, has pretended that the rams imported from that country into Spain, were any different in this particular. How recurring crosses between such animals and fine-wooled ewes should have commenced, improved, and finally fixed the characteristics of a breed like the Merino, is a problem which admits of no rational solution to a practical sheop breeder.This pedigree is probably entitled to about as much confidence as that which the Greek poets gave to the wonderful ram which bore the " Golden Fleece." He, according to this very respectable authority, was got by the sea-god Neptune, dam the nymph Theophane. Strabo, who was a. contemporary of our Saviour, and who conseque...