The COTSWOLDS derive their name from a low range of hills in Gloucestershire. These have long been noted for the numbers and excellence of the sheep there maintained, and are so called from Cote, a sheepfold, and Would, a naked hill. An old writer says:--"In these woulds they feed in great numbers flocks of sheep, long necked and square of bulk and bone, by reason (as is commonly thought) of the weally and hilly situation of their pastures, whose wool, being most fine and soft, is held in passing great account amongst all nations." Since his time, however, great changes have passed both upon the sheep and the district they inhabit. The improved Cotswolds are among the largest British breeds, long wooled, prolific, good nurses, and of early maturity. More robust, and less liable to disease than the Leicesters, of fine symmetry and carrying great weight and light offal, they are among the most popular of large mutton sheep. The SOUTH DOWN is an ancient British breed, taking its name from a chalky range of hills in Sussex and other counties in England about sixty miles in length, known as the South Downs, by the side of which is a tract of land of ordinary fertility and well calculated for sheep walks, and on which probably more than a million of this breed of sheep are pastured. The flock tended by the "Shepherd of Salisbury Plain," of whose earnest piety and simple faith Hannah More has told us in her widely circulated tract, were South Downs. Formerly these sheep possessed few of the attractions they now present. About the year 1782 Mr. John Ellman of Glynde turned his attention to their improvement. Unlike his cotemporary Bakewell, he did not attempt to make a new breed by crossing, but by attention to the principles of breeding, by skillful selections for coupling and continued perseverance for fifty years, he obtained what he sought--health, soundness of constitution, symmetry of form, early maturity, and facility of fattening, and thus brought his flock to a high state of perfection. Before he began we are told that the South Downs were of "small size and ill shape, long and thin in the neck, high on the shoulders, low behind, high on the loins, down on the rumps, the tail set on very low, sharp on the back, the ribs flat," &c., &c., and were not mature enough to fatten until three years old or past. Of his flock in 1794, Arthur Young[25] says: "Mr. Ellman's flock of sheep, I must observe in this place, is unquestionably the first in the country; there is nothing that can be compared with it; the wool is the finest and the carcass the best proportioned; although I saw several noble flocks afterwards which I examined with a great degree of attention; some few had very fine wool, which might be equal to his, but then the carcass was ill-shaped, and many had a good carcass with coarse wool; but this incomparable farmer had eminently united both these circumstances in his flock at Glynde. I affirm this with