Page:Rambles in Australia (IA ramblesinaustral00grewiala).pdf/116

86 sheep, and Mr. Murray's thousand-guinea ram lives only in portraiture in the hall of his farm; but we did see some of the famous herd of which Lion II was the congener. They had been rounded up for us, about fifty of them, in one of the shearing yards; and most attractive animals they were. Their thick merino fleece was about five inches deep, like soft fibre, and their thick necks were in folds—concertina folds, as they are called. They have been bred to this type, and their peculiar scientific interest is the information which they afford to the explorers of Mendelian principles of the permanence of the so-called "factors of heredity." But to the practical stock-breeder their immediate interest is the vast amount of wool they yield. Mr. Murray said (if memory is not at fault) that they each yielded about fifteen pounds' weight of wool at a shearing.

Of course the reason why we saw so few sheep is that, though this was a comparatively small holding of very good pasture, and the sheep on it are all, in a sense, specimen sheep, yet here, as elsewhere, the thousands of the flock are spread over a very wide area of pasturage. It is only at the shearing season that the sheep would be brought together in great numbers. These occasions, and the life on sheep farms—especially