The

More to the south the fat-rumped sheep prevail, yielding every variety of wool; and in the same districts are found a smaller, lower sheep, of a more European character, and producing a fine and very useful long wool. Chinese manufacture some good serges from it, not so close as those made in Europe, but thinner and finer, and having a peculiar silky appearance. They likewise prepare a considerable quantity of felts of various colours. The largeness and beauty of the Chinese carpets have often been praised. An old traveller says, that "when the Dutch presented the Emperor of China with some scarlet and other cloths made in Europe, he asked how, and what they were made of? Being told, he replied that his subjects could make them, and, therefore, there was no need to bring them so far *"

TARTARIAN SHEEP.

The wilds of Central Asiatic Tartary present nearly the same breeds of sheep, and the same management and the same modes of life in the owners, that have been already described when those districts were considered that bordered on the country which the primitive shepherds traversed. The fat-rumped sheep chiefly occupy Southern Tartary-the broad-tailed ones are found in Northern and Middle Asia. In the former there is considerable variety in the shape, and size, and fleece, and particularly in the number of horns. The four-horned sheep are numerous in several parts, and a few have six horns; the forehead is convex, and there are wattles under the throat. In the latter there is some, but less difference of size, and of accumulation of fat on the loins. They are more disposed to general good condition, and the quality of the fleece is better.

THE ARGALI.

Amidst the highest mountains of Central Asia lives the ARGALI, deemed, by some authors, but erroneously so, the parent of all the varieties of the domestic sheep. He is one of the few remaining wild sheep; and as such, and on account of his superior size and beauty, as well as the relation in which he has been supposed to stand to sheep generally, deserves particular notice. The account given by Pallas will be chiefly followed, for he describes that which he had actually seen.

Before Siberia was colonised, the Argali used to frequent the lofty mountains extending from the river Irtisch to Kamtschatka; but now, shunning the neighbourhood of man, it has retreated to the more perfect deserts of Kamtschatka in the north, to the Mongolian and Songarian mountains towards the centre of Asia, and to the steeps of Caucasus in the south.

When it is found, it is usually on some barren but not very lofty rock, where it can bask itself in the rays of the sun, and see the possible approach of danger on every side. It does not, however, occupy the highest part of the mountains on which it grazes. The ibex, an inhabitant of the same rocks, ranges far above it. Although it flies to these precipices for security, it does not, like the ibex, delight in the cold, but seeks as warm a situation as such desert regions can afford.

The Argali is about the size of the fallow deer, but is very differently formed. Its legs and its neck are shorter, and the muscles of its limbs are stouter; it displays more bulk than the deer, and promises more strength than speed. The male is considerably larger and stouter than the female; he is three feet high at the withers, and sometimes weighs more than 200 pounds.

* Navarette's Account of China (Churchill's Collection), vol. i. p. 45.

The head is that of a ram, but the ears are small in proportion to the developement of the head, and erect. The horns are of an enormous size, nearly four feet in length, and with a hollow so considerable, that young foxes occasionally conceal themselves in those that have been accidentally shed. According to Major Smith, "they rise near the eyes, before the ears, occupying the greater part of the back of the head, and nearly touching above the forehead, bending at first backwards and downwards, then to the front, and the points finally outwards and upwards; the base is triangular; the broadest side towards the forehead, the surface wrinkled crossways to beyond their middle, and the extremity more smooth*." The horns, however, as in the subjoined cut, differ materially in different animals. The horns of the Argali of Caucasus are rounder, heavier, and larger throughout their whole course. The horn of either species, with its bony basis, will weigh 14lbs. or 15lbs. The following is a cut of the head and horns of the Asiatic Argali, taken from a specimen in the collection of the Linnæan Society.

The summer coat consists of short hair, smooth, and resembling that of a deer. The winter coat has a longer external coat of hair, but concealing a thick and soft layer of wool. The colour is of a reddish-brown in summer, changing to a brownish-grey in winter; and the inner coat of wool is always white. Both in winter and summer there is a large disk of a buff colour on the haunch. The horns of the female are shorter and smaller, and nearly straight; her colour is likewise paler, and there is no buff coloured spot on the haunch. The throat is covered with longer hair, and the tail is very short.

The Argalis are generally found in flocks of eight or ten in number. The males during the rutting season fight furiously; but otherwise this is a timid, or cowardly animal, and rarely offers resistance when pursued. They are said to breed twice in the year, viz., in spring and in autumn. The female seldom produces more than one at a birth, and the young lamb is covered with a soft, gray, curling fleece, as in many of the half-domesticated breeds of sheep, and which, by degrees, exhibits the usual mixture of hair and wool in these animals. From the commencement of the spring to the approach of winter, they pasture in the little secluded valleys, among the mountains, and become very fat, and in high request. As winter approaches they descend lower, and there, from scarcity of food and constant fear and alarm, they lose all their condition, and when the time arrives for their return to

* Animal Kingdom, vol. iv. p. 317.

the mountains, they are, except for the sake of their skins, comparatively worthless. When pursued they exhibit all the fear and peculiar gait and manner of the sheep; they run from side to side, and stop every moment to look at their pursuers; yet, as their flight is uniformly towards the most inaccessible parts of the mountains, the chase of them is frequently attended by no little danger. The young ones are very easily tamed, but no severity or kindness will render the adult animal tractable*.

A variety of the Argali is found in North America, and was long known by the name of the sheep of California. The Canadian free traders recognized it by the title of Culblane. The Abbé Lambert gives the following account of it:-"Besides several sorts of animals known among us, there are two sorts of fallow beasts unknown in Europe. They call them sheep, because they have the figure of our sheep. The first species is as large as a calf one or two years old. Their head has a great resemblance to that of a stag, and their horns to those of a ram. Their tail and hair, which are speckled, are shorter than those of a stag, their flesh is very good and delicate t."

Mr. M'Gillivray, in his account of his travels in the Rocky Mountains, gives the first scientific account of it. He describes it as resembling the Asiatic Argali in size and form, but having still larger horns, not quite so close at their roots, covering the greater part of the forehead, proceeding at first decidedly upwards, then turning suddenly downwards for nearly one third of the length of the neck, after this once more bending upwards, and terminating in a sharp point. The face and mouth white, the cheeks, neck, back, and limbs of a grey and rufous dun colour, and the tail and buttocks of a white buff.

They are found in troops of thirty or forty, on the steepest ridges of the mountains, but in winter they descend nearer to the plain.

The following cut is delineated from a specimen in the Museum of the Zoological Society of London.

Major Hamilton Smith adds, that "if the American species be the same as the Asiatic, which appears very probable, it can have reached the New World only over the ice by Behring's Straits; and the passage may be conjectured as comparatively of a recent date, since the Argali has not spread

* Animal Kingdom, vol. iv. p. 318; Quarterly Journal of Agriculture, vol. ii. p. 369; Illustrations of Natural History, vol. i. p. 146; and Anderson on Sheep.

+ Lambert's Observations on Asia, Africa, and America, vol. i. p. 130.

eastward beyond the Rocky Mountains, nor to the south farther than California *'

THE MOUFLON OR MUSMON.

Buffon and Wilson have considered this sheep as identical with the Argali. Major Smith seems to regard it as a variety of the Argali. It will therefore be necessary, although travelling into another quarter of the world, to describe the mouflon. It inhabits the mountains of Corsica and Sardinia, and has been found in Crete, Cyprus, and some other of the islands of the Grecian Archipelago. It formerly abounded in Spain, and it was known to the early naturalists; Pliny describes it under the names of musmon and ophion. He says that" there is in Spain, but especially in the Island of Corsica, a kind of musmones not altogether unlike to sheep, having a shag more like the hair of goats than a fleece with sheep's wool. The kind which is engendered between them and sheep, they called in old time, umbri."

Mr. Wilson gives the most correct account of this animal. It is usually about two feet and a half in height, and three feet and a half from the nose to the commencement of the tail. The horns never exceed two feet in length; they are curved backwards, and the points turn inwards; the roots of the horns are very thick, and wrinkled; the ears are of a middle size, straight and pointed; there is the rudiment of a lachrymal opening as in the deer; the neck is thick; the body round; the limbs muscular; and the tail short. The colour is generally of a dull, or brownish-grey, with some white on the fore part of the face and on the legs; a tuft of longer hair beneath the throat; a dark streak along the back; and the upper part of the face black, with black streaks along the cheeks; the mouth, the nostrils, and the tongue are also black, and a spot of pale yellow is on the sides.

* Animal Kingdom, vol. iv. p. 319,

The forehead of this sheep is particularly arched. The females are generally without horns, and where they do appear, they are considerably less than those of the male.

The musmons rarely quit the highest parts of their native mountains; but the temperature of the countries in which these sheep are usually found does not admit of perpetual snow. They congregate in herds, seldom exceeding a hundred individuals, and, in the winter, the herds divide themselves into lesser groups, consisting of a male and a few females. The young ones are generally dropped in April or May, and are carefully attended to by their dams,

The musmon is covered by a fine hair of no great length, having beneatli it a thick, grey-coloured wool, short, but full of spirals, and the edges thickly serrated*.

says

Cuvier that domestication has little effect in developing any good quality in these animals, and that they rarely exhibit either intelligence, confidence, affection, or docility. He speaks of those that were in the Menagerie at Paris, of which he was the director; and his account very much coincides with observations made by the author of this work in the gardens of the Zoological Society of London. They were by many degrees more stupid and mischievous than any of the other breeds of sheep which that Menagerie contained. Major Hamilton Smith says, that their skins are used for various purposes; and in the islands of Corsica and Sardinia the mountaineers still convert them into vests, and a kind of cloaks, which may be the present representatives of those noticed in the Commentaries of Cæsar, as made from the skin of the musmo (musmon)—a dress that was much worn by the inland robberst.

NORTH AMERICAN SHEEP.

Until the introduction of the Merinos into North America little that was satisfactory could be affirmed of the sheep of any part of that country. Many portions of the United States, and even of Canada, possessed advantages for the breeding of sheep that were not surpassed in Europe. The country was undulating or hilly,-the hills covered with a fine herbage,-the enclosures more extensive than in the best breeding districts of England,-almost every pasture furnished with running water, and sheltered, more or less, by trees, against the summer's sun; yet the sheep were of the commonest kind: there was a prejudice against their meat; a prejudice against them altogether; and there was scarcely a district in which the wool was fit for any but the coarser kind of fabrics.

It might have been thought to be the policy of the mother country to foster a prejudice of this kind, in order that her colonies might be as dependent as possible upon her; and particularly that her woollen manufactures might there find a ready sale: accordingly the American sheep, although somewhat differing in various districts, consisted chiefly of a coarse kind of Leicester, and these were originally of British breed. The "American Husbandry," published in 1776, describes the New England wool as "long and coarse, and manufactured into a rough kind of cloth, which is the only wear of the province, except the gentry, who wear the finer cloths of Britain."

* Wilson on Domestic Animals, in Quarterly Journal of Agriculture, vol. ii, p. 359, See also the Animal Kingdom, vol. iv. p. 322.

† Animal Kingdom, vol. iv. p. 324.

A writer in the Farmer's Magazine thus expresses himself:-" In the western parts of Virginia sheep are well managed, for there is no prejudice against mutton. In the North Eastern States there are good sheep pastures, and a moderate dislike of mutton: but in Kentucky, the farmer would dine upon dry bread rather than taste his own mutton."