Sheep
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The Sheep and Its Cousins
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE MOUFLON, OR WILD SHEEP OF EUROPE, AND ITS FORERUNNERS When the great Swedish naturalist Linnaeus wrote his Systema Natura in the middle of the eighteenth century, he appears to have been ignorant of the existence of a wild sheep in the islands of Sardinia and Corsica; and it was therefore not till some years later that this mouflon, as it is called by the French?the musmon or musimon of the natives of Sardinia and Corsica?received a scientific name; the designation Ovis musimon having been given to this species by the German naturalist Schreber in 1795. At a later period it was thought that the mouflon differed in certain important structural features from domesticated sheep? the typical representatives of the genus Ovis?and it was accordingly referred to a genus by itself, under the name of Caprovis. Subsequent investigations showed, however, that this supposed difference is non-existent; and there are good grounds for regarding the mouflon as the ancestral stock from which some of the European tame breeds have taken origin. If it could be definitely PLATE II Fig. I Fig. 2 Fig. I. A Mouflon Ram. Fig. 2. A Soa Ram. ascertained which breed ? or breeds ? originated from the mouflon, it would be obvious that, if such breed could be regarded as the type of the Ovis aries of Linnaeus, the proper designation of the mouflon would be O. aries musimon. The name mouflon, or muflon, appears to have been invented, like several others in natural history, by the French naturalist Buffon. The animal (pi. ii. fig. 1) is about the size of an average tame sheep, but much more neatly built, so that it has a more antelope-like appearance, the resemblance being enhanced by the replacement of the woolly fleece by a coat of close-lying hair. In common with all the...
