In about a year it began to look dingy; and
blackening each succeeding year, it became coal-black at the end of
four. Its chief food was hemp seed. Such influence has food on the color
of animals! Darwin, in his Voyage, says that the wild cattle in East
Falkland Island, originally the same stock, differ much in color; and
that in different parts of that one small island, different colors
predominate. He remarked that the difference in the prevailing colors
was so obvious, that in looking at the herds from a point near Point
Pleasant, they appeared from a long distance like black spots, whilst
south of Choiseul Sound they appeared like white spots on the
hill-sides. Round Mount Usborne, at a height of one thousand to fifteen
hundred feet above the sea, about half of some of the herds are mouse or
lead colored. "From the westward till you get to the river Adur,"
observed White, "all the flocks have horns and smooth white faces, and
white legs, and a hornless sheep is rarely to be seen; but as soon as
you pass that river eastward, and mount Beeding Hill, all the flocks at
once become hornless, or, as they call them, poll-sheep; and have,
moreover, black faces, with a white tuft of wool on their foreheads, and
speckled and spotted legs, so that you would think that the flocks of
Laban were pasturing on one side of the stream, and the variegated breed
of his son-in-law, Jacob, were cantoned along on the other." Youatt
speaks of two flocks of Leicester sheep which have been purely bred from
the original stock of Mr. Bakewell for more than fifty years. There is
not a suspicion existing in the mind of any one at all acquainted with
the subject, that the owner of either of them has deviated in any one
instance from the pure blood of Mr. Bakewell's flock, and yet the
difference between the sheep possessed by these two gentlemen is so
great that they have the appearance of being quite different varieties.
"We may, in truth," said Voltaire, "be naturally and aptly resembled to
a river, all whose waters pass away in perpetual change and flow. It is
the same river as to its bed, its banks, its source, its mouth,
everything, in short, that is not itself; but changing every moment its
water, which constitutes its very being, it has no identity; there is no
sameness belonging to the river." Said Sir Kenelm Digby, long before
Voltaire, "There is not one drop of the same water in the Thames that
ran down by Whitehall yesternight; yet no man will deny but that it is
the same river that was in Queen Elizabeth's time, as long as it is
supplied from the same common stock, the sea."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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