duced by William of Orange, and the means were provided for trebling the number of sheep which an acre of land could support. The results at the present time to the English woollen manufacture are, that the worsted manufacture far surpasses the clothing-wool manufacture, the two together supporting a population of over a million; and the towns which have been the centres of the worsted manufacture have made a more rapid progress than any in Great Britain, Bradford having increased her population 90,000 in fifty years. The result of this reciprocal action to the agriculture of England is a genuine transformation, of external character at least, in the English races of sheep. The production of combing wool, the kind in greatest demand, was secured by breeding sheep which would attain the utmost possible weight of mutton, which could be fed to their utmost capacity, and would produce the utmost amount of manure. The merino sheep, although introduced into England at about the same time as into Germany and France, which they have so greatly enriched; and although their culture was encouraged by the King and the first noblemen of the realm, were finally wholly discarded. The mutton sheep is at this moment not only the chief animal product of England, but it is what it was declared to be long ago, "the sheet-anchor of English agriculture." It is the chief animal product of Great Britain. The statistics of domestic animals, published by the Royal Agricultural Society, show that Great Britain had, in 1868, 30,711,396 sheep, 5,423,981 cattle, and 2,308,539 pigs. The sheep is literally the basis of English husbandry. The agriculture of England, as a whole, is very simple. Four crops, in regular rotation and mainly in the same order, constitute her great staples. Turnips, barley, grass, and wheat, are said to be the four magical words at which the earth unlocks her treasures to the British farmer. The four field, or four shift system, which pervades the greater part of the kingdom, consists of this succession. The profit is in the barley and wheat alone; the turnips and grass serve mainly to feed the sheep, which furnish mutton and wool to support them in their most important function, that of manuring the turnip field upon which they

are folded, for the four years' rotation. It is this function which I wish to bring into special prominence. Recent agricultural writers in England affirm this to be the main object of English sheep husbandry. Professor Coleman, of the Agricultural College of Cirencester, in a paper recently read before the Royal Agricultural Society, on the breeding and feeding of sheep, says: "It is not difficult to show that sheep alone, apart from their influence on the corn crops, will not pay a living profit, after all the expenses of growing the crops are considered." Other practical writers for the same journal declare that there is no profit in growing sheep in England simply for their mutton and wool, but that the culture of sheep is still an indispensable necessity, as there is no other means of keeping up the land.

Passing away from England, I observe that the highest authorities in France inculcate the same lesson. The most eminent of French practical statesmen, M. Thiers, in his great discourse on the protective question, delivered in the Legislative Assembly in January last, demands protective duties upon the wool of France; as it is threatened that the fine sheep, unprotected through duties on wool, must disappear from the soil of France, in consequence of competition from the southern hemisphere. He says: "Upon four-fifths of the territory, where the soil is stony, and only fine grasses abound, the fine sheep alone can convert this grass into flesh and manure." After giving the facts as to the decline of the ovine population of France, and its enormous increase in Australia and La Plata, he continues: "In this situation, how can the French resist the foreign competition? The agricultural industry of France cannot dispense with sheep. The facts which I have given you ought to inspire you with the most serious concern." The same lesson is taught by the best practical agriculturists of the United States. Mr. Stilson, president of the Wisconsin Wool-Growers' Association, has shown that his flock of fifteen hundred sheep has enabled him to produce eight or ten more bushels of wheat to the acre than is grown on the average lands of Wisconsin, where sheep husbandry is not an auxiliary to wheat farming. The president of the Ohio Wool-Growers' Association, Mr.

Stevens, whom I had the pleasure of meeting this summer, at the Indianapolis Exposition, assured me that he could see no means of reclaiming the rapidly deteriorating lands of Ohio except by the restorative influence of sheep husbandry. We have seen lands in certain portions of the West producing wheat so abundantly as to compel the opening of railroad lines for the single purpose of transporting their teeming harvests; and have also seen, in our own time, these very lands so rapidly exhausted, that the rails have been torn up for want of traffic. Such facts apprise us that there is no security for continued fruitfulness, even in our most fertile States, but in a more provident agriculture. What is taken from the land must be restored. Science gives us but little encouragement in the promise of cheap imported or artificial manures. The guano beds are being rapidly exhausted. The experiments of Messrs. Lawes and Gilbert, at Rothamsted, show that the application to the land of sewage from the cities, from which so much was expected, is a failure. The brilliant experiments of Vila, in France, made to exhibit the applicability of artificial manures in place of animal manures, in countries like France, where the land is so much divided as not to permit the profitable culture of animals, lead to no practical results, because no economical sources of artificial nitrates, phosphates, or potash, have been or are likely to be discovered. We see, but as through grated windows, exhaustless but practically inaccessible stores of potash in the granite rocks; of phosphates in beds of apatite; and of nitrogen in the atmosphere, or in the far-off rainless plains of Chili. Has not Providence locked up these treasures, or removed them from our reach, to compel man, for his highest physical good, to cultivate the animal which best supplies the primal necessities, — food, clothing, and the continued enrichment of the earth? The blessing, in the olden time, was given to him who "brought of the firstlings of his flock," for "the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering."

There are other relations of the woollen industry to agriculture, much less broad in their scope, but so interesting and illustrative that I cannot pass them by. The first which I allude to, because

connected with the topic which we have just considered, is the achievement which chemical science has recently effected in saving the potash contained in the yolk of fleeces in such a form that it may be returned to the soil or used in the arts. It is well known that sheep draw from the land upon which they graze a considerable quantity of potash, which, after circulating in the blood, is excreted from the skin with the sweat, in combination with which it is deposited in the wool. The French chemists MM. Maumoné and Rogelet have established quite recently at the great seats of the woollen manufacture in France, as at Rheims and Elbeuf, factories for putting the new industry which they have created into practical operation. They induce the woollen manufacturers to preserve and sell to them the solutions of yolk obtained by the washing of the raw fleeces in cold water, and pay such a price as encourages the manufacturers to wash their wool methodically, so as to enrich the same water with the yolk of a number of fleeces. These scourings the chemists carry to their factory, and then boil them down to a dry, carbonaceous residuum. The alkaline salts remain in the charred residuum, and are extracted by lixiviation with water. The most important of the alkalies obtained is potash, which is recovered in a state of great purity. It is computed that if the fleeces of all the sheep of France, estimated at forty-seven millions, were subjected to the new treatment, France would derive from this source alone all the potash she requires in the arts, enough to make about twelve thousand tons of commercial carbonate of potash, convertible into seventeen thousand five hundred tons of saltpetre, which would charge eighteen hundred and seventy million cartridges. So that the inoffensive sheep, the emblem of peace, can be made to supply the chief muniment of war. The obvious lesson from these facts, to the sheep farmer, is to wash his fleeces at home, in such a manner that the wash water, so rich in potash, may be distributed upon the land as liquid manure.

I have already adverted to the influence of the wool manufacture of England in developing the breeds of long-woolled sheep in that country. Facts illustrative of the influence of manufacture upon sheep husbandry are furnished by all manufacturing nations.

In the indolent nations of the East, manufacturers adapt themselves to the raw material which has been furnished for ages. The beautiful Turkish carpets of Asia Minor are produced now, as they doubtless were in the time of the Crusades, from coarse wool grown upon the Barbarous broad-tailed sheep, which is still precisely the same as those which formed the flocks watched by the shepherds of the Bible, and to which belonged the Paschal lamb. Nations of higher civilization are constantly varying their fabric and their sheep husbandry.

The Spanish merino, which I conceive to be a relic of Greek and Roman civilization preserved in the mountains of Andalusia from the barbarians who swept over most of the Roman possessions, was introduced about a century ago into all the manufacturing nations of Europe. When introduced into France, at the sheep-folds of Rambouillet, it produced a short clothing wool. Let me, before describing the important change which subsequently took place, advert for a moment to a zoological principle.

A beautiful law of nature has been brought into view by the studies of modern zoölogy, that, while the primary and specific characters, determined by the forms of the skeleton, are absolutely fixed, and transmit themselves infallibly by generation, the secondary or accessory forms of animals, such as the fleshy covering, hair, and fleece, the only characters which man has in view in cultivating the domestic animals, can be modified indefinitely by culture. For example, the sheep in a state of nature is provided with two kinds of covering. The outer or principal covering is a coarse hair. Beneath this hair, and concealed by it, is a short, fine down. It is this down, which, by the culture of sheep in a state of domestication, has become the woolly fleece, and which is again susceptible of being modified by the climate in which it is developed, or the care of which it is the object. This modification of the secondary characters of animals is sometimes the result of high agricultural skill, or, to use the more accurate modern term, zootechnic skill, directed to a specific object, as in the labors of Bakewell and Elman, in England, and of Hammond, in Vermont. But the modification generally takes place insensibly.