traveller will stick to the inimitable Kalb's
cutlets, and avoid Merino mutton. In Hungary
there is a native breed, which, when untainted
by Merino crosses and fatted by one of the
disciples of English farmers, makes a very tolerable
imitation of the black-faced Scotch.

But, important as the muttonian branch of
British wealth is, luxury, and agricultural and
manufacturing power, little or no pains have as
yet been taken to diffuse and make popular the
history, progress, and present condition of the
British sheep among those classes who, living
by them and on them, are elaborately taught
the whole natural history of animals only to be
found tame and worth a shilling in travelling
shows and zoological gardens.

Small national and workhouse schoolboys can
describe with anatomical minuteness the whole
arrangements of the stomach of the camel; and
young ladies frequenting colleges, at short notice
will write out a neat essay on the introduction
of the silkworm into Europe; but, if you were to
ask the primest competitors of the middle class
examinations, or those wonders of book
knowledge, the civil service candidates, who founded
the modern South Down—who invented the
Leicester sheep—it is ten to one but they
would be irrevocably floored. And yet the
improvement in sheep had no small share in the
agricultural changes commenced in the time of
George the Third, which have doubled, trebled,
and quadrupled our wheat and corn manufacture
—changes only less important than those
bred of the steam-engine and the spinning-
jenny.

The systematic improvement of sheep, as well
as of all our other cattle, dates back between
eighty and ninety years, to the labour of a man
whose name is a household word with the
stock breeders of France, and Germany, and the
United States, as well as of England—Robert
Bakewell. Before his time, and long after his
time, in many wide districts of Great Britain
and Ireland the sheep was in the same position
and occupied the same place in farming
economy as it now does on the greater part of the
continent of Europe, where the Merino is not
carefully cultivated; that is to say, the position
of a machine for producing with very little care
a very little wool, and, when too old to eat, a
little fatless, tough mutton.

Every district had its own breed, as for
instance, Kent, Warwickshire, Leicestershire,
Lincolnshire, coarse varieties of the breed, producing
the long wools which were so long supposed
to be the sole foundation of our woollen
manufacturers, and therefore guarded by a series of
anti-exporting acts of Parliament. On the
short, sweet grass of the Chalk Down from
Sussex to Wilts, fed the grey and black-faced
progenitors of the South Down and the
Hampshire Down. Dorset had the originals of the
white-faced horned Dorsets. Somersetshire had
the foundation of the Cotswolds. Shropshire and
Staffordshire the once famous peckly-faced breed
now so changed as to be claimed by both the long
wools and the short wools; Norfolk, the big-horned,
black-faced, wild, and hardy wool-bearers, now
almost extinct, changed as much by crossings as
a tall clodhopper after seven years' service in a
crack infantry regiment. Devonshire and Cornwall
had the Bamptons now improved one of
knowledge, into " Notts," as well as the active
unimproved Dartmoors and little improved
Exmoors. The foundation of all the improvements
in every breed of English and Scotch sheep was
laid by Bakewell, when he set about to
manufacture the Leicester.

It is supposed that he began by selecting the
best specimens of a large Warwickshire sheep.
The originals, as we may see in Bewick's
quadrupeds, were not unlike the specimens of long-
legged, long-woolled unimproved Dutch sheep
that occasionally find their way to the
metropolitan market. He began with a white-faced,
hornless, docile-tempered, bred among rich
pastures, where, unlike Down and Mountain breeds,
they could fill themselves with very little
travelling; for Bakewell foresaw that in a population
like ours, mutton was worth more than
wool, and so by selection he set to work to
produce an animal which would grow, not only the
most meat out of its small bones, but as much
legs and loins as possible, and also could ripen
this mutton as soon as possible. In a word, he
went in for symmetry, quality, and early
maturity, treating size and wool as secondary
objects. Thus he struck a deadly blow at that
luxury, the four-year-old haunch. Without
entering into tiresome details, it is enough to
say that he succeeded, and probably produced
Leicester sheep as perfect in symmetry as have
ever been bred since, with all the aid of
experience and modern advantages. And this is
the more curious because the Bakewell or
Dishley sheep, now a fixed type, is not an
improved aboriginal breed, but a creature from a
series of judicious crosses of divers long-woolled
breeds. In obtaining this success, he materially
reduced the size, but what he lost in bones he
gained in flesh and fat.

In 1790 he had so far succeeded, not only in
establishing a breed, but in inspiring the
confidence of his agricultural friends, that he was
able to found a Secret Sheep Breeding Club
under the name of the " Dishley Society." By
secrecy he attempted to supply the want of the
protection of patent for his invention.

The rules are as mysterious as those of a
society of political freemasons, and as exclusive
as the model tariff of a French Protectionist.

For instance, by Resolution 1: Eleven
subscribers, including Mr. Bakewell himself, agree
to pay the sum of ten guineas each, in such
sums, and at such times, and for such purposes
as shall hereafter be agreed upon by the majority
of subscribers.

And Resolution No. 4, declares: "That secrecy
shall be kept by all members respecting the
business of these meetings; and that any member
quitting the society keep secret, upon his
honour, the transactions before he left it." In
1794: " It is resolved, that no ram be let to any
ram breeder at less than forty guineas."