The
Water-Ousel Plucks Moss From The Riverbank To Build Its Nest, But Is
Does Not Improve The Moss By Plucking It.
We pluck feathers from
birds, and less directly wool from wild sheep, for the manufacture of
clothing and cradle-nests, without improving the wool for the sheep,
or the 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 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
A Geologist's Winter Walk[3]
After reaching Turlock, I sped afoot over the stubble fields and
through miles of brown hemizonia and purple erigeron, to Hopeton,
conscious of little more than that the town was behind and beneath me,
and the mountains above and before me; on through the oaks and
chaparral of the foothills to Coulterville; and then ascended the
first great mountain step upon which grows the sugar pine.
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