There is an explanation, however. Forty years ago I made acquaintance with a fact which impressed me by its significant implications; and has, for this reason I suppose, remained in my memory. It is set forth in the _Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society_, vol. xiv. (1853), pp. 214 et seq., and concerns certain results of crossing English and French breeds of sheep. The writer of the translated paper, M. Malingié-Nouel, Director of the Agricultural School of La Charmoise, states that when the French breeds of sheep (in which were included “the _mongrel_ Merinos”) were crossed with an English breed, “the lambs present the following results. Most of them resemble the mother more than the father; some show no trace of the father.” Joining the admission respecting the mongrels with the facts subsequently stated, it is tolerably clear that the cases in which the lambs bore no traces of the father were cases in which the mother was of pure breed. Speaking of the results of these crossings in the second generation “having seventy-five per cent. of English blood,” M. Nouel says:—“The lambs thrive, wear a beautiful appearance, and complete the joy of the breeder.... No sooner are the lambs weaned than their strength, their vigour, and their beauty begin to decay.... At last the constitution gives way ... he remains stunted for life”: the constitution being thus proved unstable or unadapted to the requirements. How, then, did M. Nouel succeed in obtaining a desirable combination of a fine English breed with the relatively poor French breeds? He took an animal from “flocks originally sprung from a mixture of the two distinct races that are established in these two provinces [Berry and La Sologne],” and these he “united with animals of another mixed breed, ... which blended the Tourangelle and native Merino blood of” La Beauce and Touraine, and obtained a mixture of all four races “without decided character, without fixity, ... but possessing the advantage of being used to our climate and management.” Putting one of these “mixed-blood ewes to a pure New-Kent ram ... one obtains a lamb containing fifty-hundredths of the purest and most ancient English blood, with twelve and a-half hundredths of four different French races, which are individually lost in the preponderance of English blood, and disappear almost entirely, leaving the improving type in the ascendant.... All the lambs produced strikingly resembled each other, and even Englishmen took them for animals of their own country.” M. Nouel goes on to remark that when this derived breed was bred with itself, the marks of the French breeds were lost. “Some slight traces could be detected by experts, but these soon disappeared.”