Steep Trails | Page 7

feathers
for the bird that wore them. When a hawk pounces upon a linnet and
proceeds to pull out its feathers, preparatory to making a meal, the
hawk may be said to be cultivating the linnet, and he certainly does
effect an improvement as far as hawk-food is concerned; but what of
the songster? He ceases to be a linnet as soon as he is snatched from the
woodland choir; and when, hawklike, we snatch the wild sheep from its
native rock, and, instead of eating and wearing it at once, carry it home,
and breed the hair out of its wool and the bones out of its body, it
ceases to be a sheep.
These breeding and plucking processes are similarly improving as
regards the secondary uses aimed at; and, although the one requires but
a few minutes for its accomplishment, the other many years or
centuries, they are essentially alike. We eat wild oysters alive with
great directness, waiting for no cultivation, and leaving scarce a second
of distance between the shell and the lip; but we take wild sheep home
and subject them to the many extended processes of husbandry, and
finish by boiling them in a pot--a process which completes all sheep
improvements as far as man is concerned. It will be seen, therefore, that
wild wool and tame wool--wild sheep and tame sheep--are terms not
properly comparable, nor are they in any correct sense to be considered
as bearing any antagonism toward each other; they are different things.
Planned and accomplished for wholly different purposes.
Illustrative examples bearing upon this interesting subject may be
multiplied indefinitely, for they abound everywhere in the plant and
animal kingdoms wherever culture has reached. Recurring for a
moment to apples. The beauty and completeness of a wild apple tree
living its own life in the woods is heartily acknowledged by all those
who have been so happy as to form its acquaintance. The fine wild
piquancy of its fruit is unrivaled, but in the great question of quantity as
human food wild apples are found wanting. Man, therefore, takes the

tree from the woods, manures and prunes and grafts, plans and guesses,
adds a little of this and that, selects and rejects, until apples of every
conceivable size and softness are produced, like nut galls in response to
the irritating punctures of insects. Orchard apples are to me the most
eloquent words that culture has ever spoken, but they reflect no
imperfection upon Nature's spicy crab. 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