On the raw materials from the animal kingdom, displayed in the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations / by Richard Owen.
- Owen, Richard, Sir, 1804-1892.
- Date:
- [1852]
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: On the raw materials from the animal kingdom, displayed in the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations / by Richard Owen. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
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![If the test of the value of a domestic animal he the numbers on the | preservation of which human care is bestowed, and on the extent of the a habitable globe over which mankind has diffused the species, then the < sheep takes the first rank. With regard to an animal so essentially j related to the welfare of mankind, every fact in its natural history is of special interest, and we are particularly concerned in the endeavour to trace the origin of the domesticated variety to which we owe so [ much. The recent progress of palaeontology, or the science of fossil organic remains,—remarkable for its unprecedented rapidity,—adds a new ele- ment to the elucidation of this question, which was so ably discussed by Buffon, and the naturalists of the last century. At present, however, the evidence which palaeontology yields is of the negative kind. No unequi- vocal fossil remains of the sheep have yet been found in the bone-caves, i the drift, or the more tranquil stratified newer pleiocene deposits, so associated with the fossil bones of oxen, wild boar, wolves, foxes, otters, beavers, &c., as to indicate the coevality of the sheep with those species, or in such an altered state as to indicate them to have been of equal antiquity. I have had my attention particularly directed to this point in collecting evidence for a “ History of our British Fossil Mammalia.”] Wherever the truly characteristic parts, viz. the bony cores of the horns, .1 have been found associated with jaws, teeth, and other parts of the skele- : ton of a ruminant, corresponding in size and other characters, with those of the goat and sheep in the formations of the newer pleiocene period, I such supports of the horns have proved to be those of the goat.* No • fossil horn-core of a sheep has yet been anywhere discovered : and so far j as this negative evidence goes, we may infer that the sheep is not geologi- cally more ancient than man ; that it is not a native of Europe ; but has j [ been introduced by the tribes who carried hither the germs of civilization in their migrations westward from Asia. Natural history, as yet, possesses no facts or principle adequate to the satisfactory solution of the question, whether the domesticated sheep—the Ovis (tries of Linnaeus—was created as such, in special relation to the exi- 1 gencies of man ; or whether it was the result of man’s interference with the habits and wild mode of life of the argali (Ovis amnion of Linnaeus), or other untamed and unsubdued species of sheep. Analogy would point to the latter hypothesis as the more probable one. Domesticated varieties 1 ol animals have been established from wild originals for the behoof of :. mankind, within a comparatively recent period in his history, of which the 1 turkey, introduced and diffused over Europe and Asia since the discovery ■; of America, is an example. Permanent varieties of the Ovis aries itself j have been instituted by the art and interference of man, of which I shall presently have to recount the chief circumstances of a very recent and : remarkable instance. The most ancient records of our race, both sacred and profane, tell us of the sheep as already an animal domesticated for the food and clothing of man ; and it is a significant fact, that both, the i* Scythians of the elevated plains of Inner Asia,—who, according to Hero- i * A characteristic fossil of this kind, found associated with remains of the mam- moth and leptorliine rhinoceros, in the newer fresh-water pleiocene of Walton, in Lssex, is figured in my “ History of British Fossil Mammalia,” p. 480, cut 904,](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22376781_0006.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
