The department in which Jonas Webb attained to his position and capacity of usefulness was peculiarly marked by this characteristic.  In a certain sense, it occupied a higher range of interest than that section of agriculture which is connected solely with the growing of grain, grass, and other crops.  His great and distinguishing husbandry was the cultivation of animal life.  To make two spires of grass grow where only one grew before has been pronounced as a great benefaction; and greater still are the merit and the gain of making one grow where nothing grew before.  To go into the midst of Dartmoor, and turn an acre of its cold, stony, water-soaked waste into a fruitful field of golden grain, is going into co-partnership with Providence in the work of creation to a very large and honored degree.  But to put the skilful hand of science upon creatures of flesh and blood, to re-form their physical structures and shapes, to add new inches to their stature, straighten their backs, expand their reins, amplify their chests, reduce all the lines and curves of their forms to an unborn symmetry, and then to give silky softness and texture to their aboriginal clothing—­this seems to be mounting one step higher in the attainment and dignity of creative faculties.  And this pre-eminently was the department in which Jonas Webb acquired a distinction perhaps unparalleled to the present time.  This has made his name familiar all over Christendom, and honored among the world’s benefactors.  Never, before him, did a farm-stead become such a centre and have such a wide-sweeping radius as his.  None ever possessed such centripetal attractions, or exerted such centrifugal influences for the material well-being of different and distant countries.  Indeed, those most remote are most specially indebted to his large and generous operations.  America and Australia will ever owe his memory an everlasting homage.

His operations filled and crowned two great departments of improvement seldom, if ever, carried on simultaneously and evenly to a great success by one man.  His first distinguishing speciality was sheep-culture.  When he had brought this to the highest standard of perfection ever attained, he devoted the surplus capital of skill, experience and pecuniary means he had acquired from the process to the breeding of cattle; and he became nearly as eminent in this field of improvement as in the other.  A few facts may serve as an outline of his progress in both to the American reader who is familiar with the general result of his efforts.

Jonas Webb was born at Great Thurlow, Suffolk, on the 10th of November, 1796.  His father, who died at the age of ninety-three, was a veteran in agriculture, and had attained to honorable distinction by his efforts to improve the old Norfolk breed of sheep, and by his experiments with other races.  The results obtained from these operations convinced his son that more mutton and better wool could be