The most important breed of sheep as regards the texture of the wool is the Merino (O. hispanica). The wool is fine, long, soft, twisted, in silky spiral ringlets, and naturally so oily that the fleece looks dingy and unclean from the dust outside, but is perfectly white underneath. They readily form cross breeds, called demi merinos, which have been brought to great perfection in France, whence, as well as from Spain, they have been imported into the United States. Of the other re markable varieties of the genus Ovis in different parts of the world, we may mention the fat-tailed sheep, common in Tartary, Arabia, Persia, and Egypt, the tail of which is so loaded with fat that it alone frequently weighs 20 pounds. The many-horned sheep of Iceland, and the most northern part of the Russian do minions, has three, four, or five horns, sometimes placed with great regularity, and sometimes differing in proportion and situation. The Cretan sheep, chiefly found in the island of Crete, are kept in many parts of Europe on account of the strangeness of the appearance of its horns, which are remarkably large, long, and spiral; the fat-rumped tailless sheep are met with in all the deserts of Tartary; the African or Guinea sheep, a native of all the tropical climates, both of Africa and the East. Different names are given
to the sheep, according to its sex and age. The male is called a ram or tup. After weaning, he is said to be a hog, hogget, or hoggerel, a lamb-hog, or tup hog or teg; and if castrated, a wether hog. After shearing, he is called a shear hog, or shearing, or dimmort, or tup. After the second shearing, he is a two shear ram; and so on. The female is a ewe or gimmer-lamb till weaned, and then a gimmer, or ewe-hog, or teg. After being shorn, she is a shearing-ewe or gimmen, or theave, or double-toothed ewe; and after that a two-, or three-, or four shear ewe or theave. The age of the sheep is reckoned, not from the period of their being dropped, but from the first shearing. The total number of sheep in the United States on Jan. 1, 1920, was 48,615,000.
Black sheep is a figurative term to denote a person who is, as it were, out lawed from society, by reason of his mis deeds or moral obliquities.