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is confined, dress almost entirely in cottons, and consequently do not much heed the fleece of their sheep. But the Newárs of Nepal-proper, where the Cágia most abounds, manufacture its wool into several stuffs, often mixed with cotton.

These manufactures, however, are sheerly domestic, and of little consideration, the products being poor and coarse, though owing more to unskilful manufacture than to the inferiority of the raw material, none of the mountain tribes east of Cashmir, possessing any portion of that high proficiency in the art of weaving, which has for ages given such celebrity to the looms of Cashmir, as of Delhi, of Benares, of Dacca and to Guzerat.

The Cágia sheep is a handsome breed, but the head is too large, the chaffron too prominent, and the legs too short for perfect beauty. The head is large, and massive: the eye small and pale: the ears longish pointed, narrow and pendant; the body full and deep; the legs short and rigidly perpendicular but fine; the tail short and deer-like, as in all the other breeds; the nose only less romanised than in the Barwál; and the massive horns only inferior in thickness to that breed. In the Cágia the horns are trigonal, very moderately compressed, heavily wrinkled, and curved circularly to the sides with a tense flexure, the flat smooth points being usually directed outwards and upwards, but in old age sometimes recurved into a second spheroid, the points still having the same direction as in case of the single spiration. Thus the Cágia is nearly as well armed for battle as the Barwál: but he is less used in that way by the rich and idle, owing to his inferior size and courage. The beautiful lambs are the constant pets of the ladies, this breed being of all the most docile, and made almost a domestic animal by the Newárs of Nepal-proper. The Cágia is confined to the central region of the hills and extends longitudinally, or west and east, from the Naraini to the Dúdh Cosi. The colour is very generally white. Some few are black or ochreous yellow, and the young are apt to be of the last hue, turning white as they grow up. The males are almost invariably horned, and the females frequently, even generally, so; but hornless females are not uncommon. Polycerate varieties seem unknown to the Cágia as to the Barwál breed, but are common in the Huniá, heard of in the Silingia breed. And here I may observe, that I have described the whole of the sheep, and shall do the goats, from mature

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and perfect males, and have found nothing to remark peculiar to the females beyond the occasional absence of horns, a circumstance invariably noticed in regard to the females; though I may add, once for all, that the females all exhibit the usual inferiority of size, and that their chaffron is always straight, how much soever it be bombed in the males, another indication, by the way, that the Roman nose is an adventitious, not essential, character of the genus, Not so the eye and feet and groin pits, which are organic and essential marks, and as such are universal, the Cágia not less than the others, tame and wild, male and female, exhibiting them all conspicuously. In the same light must be regarded the two teats, though this be a structural peculiarity of wider prevalence and less invariability, serving to assemble into one group (Caprida) the sheep of all sorts and the goats with many of the Antelopes, yet disappearing in the Hemitrages in the Thárs, Gorals, Chousinghas and others of the proper Antelopine family ;* and, what is very remarkable, not absolutely constant even among the true and proper sheep; for I have more than once met with Cágias possessed of 4 teats.

This, however, is a point that must be referred to the category of "questions pour un ami" like the occasional 5 molars of the sheep; and the general reader may rest secure that sheep-proper have 6 molars aud 2 teats.

I

The Cágia sheep ruts in spring and breeds in autumn, most of the young being born at the close of the rains, but without absolute constancy, for the domestic and artificial life of the Cágia leads to its often breeding irregularly throughout the year, and sometimes even twice in one year. One or two young are produced at a birth, and ordinarily in autumn, instances of two parturitions in one year being most rare. have no memorandum of the intestines. The periods of maturity, decline and death, show nothing calling for note. Having now despatched the several races of tame sheep of the mountains and of Tibet. I might next describe with equal particularity the Tarai sheep, which seems to be identical with that found all over Gangetic provinces, and is characterised by medial size, black colour, a very coarse but true fleece, frequent absence of horns in one or both sexes, a nose romanised amply, very large drooping ears, and a long thick tail frequently passing into the monstrous Dúmba "bussel." But the extent to which

See paper on the Ruminants, Journal Asiatic Society, above referred to.

my remarks, on the mountain races, have insensibly spread, warns me to return to the hills, and take up, without delay, the other branch of my subject, or the Alpine Goats. I shall therefore merely observe further of the long-tailed sheep of the Gangetic provinces or Ovis Púchia,* the Púchia of the natives, that its essential structure conforms entirely to the definition of the genus above given, whilst its deviations in subordinate points, (carefully noted above) from the wild and tame sheep of the mountains, distinctly prove the ultimate effects of domestication upon these animals to be, to augment exceedingly the size of the tail, in length and thickness, one or both, to increase the size and destroy the mobility of the ear, and to diminish the volume of the naturally massive horns until they gradually disappear in one or both sexes; the Romanising of the nose, out of all proportion to the "modesty of nature," as seen in the wild state, being a further and hardly less uniform consequence of domestication, though not one which, like the others, seems to augment most under privation of the primitive mountainous abode of these animals, as well as of their liberty and of their consequent power, freely to indulge all their natural propensities. The general Zoology and Regne Animale,† Anotice Dúmbas (Ovis steatopyga) in Tibet; but I am well assured, there are none in any part of " high Asia," or between the Altai and Himálaya, the Belut Tag and Péling. Genus CAPRA.

Goats.

Horns in both sexes.

No mufle,

No eye pits.

Feet pits in the forefeet only, or none.

No inguinal pores nor glands.

No calcic tuft nor gland.

Mammæ two.

Odour intense in males.

A true beard in both sexes, or in the males only.

These animals are further distinguished by horns, directed rather upwards and backwards than circling sideways to the front, as in the

* Púchia equivalent exactly to caudatus, from Púcch, a tail.

† Vol. II. p. 390 and IV. p. 330. The Cabul Dúmba is polycerate. That of the plains of India differs not from the ordinary sheep, save in the fat tail.

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