Every cultivated apple is a crab, not improved, but cooked, variously softened and swelled out in the process, mellowed, sweetened, spiced, and rendered pulpy and foodful, but as utterly unfit for the uses of nature as a meadowlark killed and plucked and roasted.  Give to Nature every cultured apple—­codling, pippin, russet—­and every sheep so laboriously compounded—­muffled Southdowns, hairy Cotswolds, wrinkled Merinos—­and she would throw the one to her caterpillars, the other to her wolves.

It is now some thirty-six hundred years since Jacob kissed his mother and set out across the plains of Padan-aram to begin his experiments upon the flocks of his uncle, Laban; and, notwithstanding the high degree of excellence he attained as a wool-grower, and the innumerable painstaking efforts subsequently made by individuals and associations in all kinds of pastures and climates, we still seem to be as far from definite and satisfactory results as we ever were.  In one breed the wool is apt to wither and crinkle like hay on a sun-beaten hillside.  In another, it is lodged and matted together like the lush tangled grass of a manured meadow.  In one the staple is deficient in length, in another in fineness; while in all there is a constant tendency toward disease, rendering various washings and dippings indispensable to prevent its falling out.  The problem of the quality and quantity of the carcass seems to be as doubtful and as far removed from a satisfactory solution as that of the wool.  Desirable breeds blundered upon by long series of groping experiments are often found to be unstable and subject to disease—­bots, foot rot, blind staggers, etc. —­causing infinite trouble, both among breeders and manufacturers.  Would it not be well, therefore, for some one to go back as far as possible and take a fresh start?

The source or sources whence the various breeds were derived is not positively known, but there can be hardly any doubt of their being descendants of the four or five wild species so generally distributed throughout the mountainous portions of the globe, the marked differences between the wild and domestic species being readily accounted for by the known variability of the animal, and by the long series of painstaking selection to which all its characteristics have been subjected.  No other animal seems to yield so submissively to the manipulations of culture.  Jacob controlled the color of his flocks merely by causing them to stare at objects of the desired hue; and possibly Merinos may have caught their wrinkles from the perplexed brows of their breeders.  The California species (Ovis montana)[2] is a noble animal, weighing when full-grown some three hundred and fifty pounds, and is well worthy the attention of wool-growers as a point from which to make a new departure, for pure wildness is the one great want, both of men and of sheep.

II