This is undoubtedly one of the most ancient race of sheep extant. The loose descriptions and indefinite generalities of the ancient writers, leave much to conjecture on this point; yet we have a few passages from Pliny, Columella, and some other Roman authors, which leave little doubt that the Merino was bred in their age, and had even been introduced into Italy from Greece. It is a matter of history, that the Greeks had choice breeds of sheep at an early day, which they might have derived from Egypt, Tyre, and Asia Minor, as they were intimately connected in commerce with those countries, where the woollen manufacture early reached great perfection. It is supposed that the celebrated Argonautic expedition, in quest of the golden fleece, undertaken by the Greeks nearly 1300 years before Christ, resulted in procuring a valuable race of sheep from Colchis, in the Euxine. However this may be, it is certain that when Augustus extended his peaceful sceptre over half the known world, the Romans were in possession of some flocks, bearing fleeces of exceeding fineness and beauty. They had been reared in the province of Apulia, on the southeast coast of Italy, and were called Tarentine, from Tarentum, the capital of the province. Here, then, may have been one branch of the Merino family. Another is undoubtedly described by Pliny, who says, "the _red fleece of Bætica_ was of still superior quality, _and had no fellow_." All the Spanish coast on the Mediterranean, of which Bætica formed a considerable part, comprising the modern Spanish provinces of Jaen, Cordova, Seville, Andalusia, and Granada, was early colonized by the enterprising Greeks; and this _red fleece that had no fellow_, was probably introduced by them at an early day, and by their descendants had been carried to a still higher degree of perfection than that of Apulia. Columella, the uncle of the writer on agriculture, a wealthy emigrant to Spain from Italy, A. D. 30, carried with him some of the Tarentine sheep, and thus added to the fine-woolled sheep of Spain. These two ancient streams, united perhaps with a third from the more ancient stock of the Euxine, (for Strabo asserts that some of the finest-woolled sheep were brought from that region in his time, and sold for the enormous sum of $750,) flowed on in an uninterrupted current over that broad country, and brought down to modern times the unrivalled race of the Merino. The limited region of Italy, overrun as it repeatedly was by hordes of barbarians during and after the times of the late emperors, soon lost her pampered flocks; while the extended regions of Spain, intersected in every direction by almost impassable mountains, could maintain their more hardy race, in defiance of revolution or change.