[Enclosure]

Mr. Steiger’s answer.

On reading again Mr. Darwin’s book on the origin of species, I see that I am too little of a scientific observer for being able to enter into a thorough discussion of my views. If not in the whole extent yet on the whole I have found Darwin’s principles to be true. But that is just, what strikes me, that I don’t see, why a thing is proved by so many words, what I found true by a thirty years working in practical breeding. I think it ridiculous with Mr. Darwin to call a great many varieties “races”, which are nothing but little variations of one species and cannot yet claim that title. I lay more stress than Darwin on other causes, not only on the selection.

Nearly all Saxon races are Merinos, in modern times there have some English Southdowns⁵ come true   My observations have been made therefore only on Merinos and I am not able to compare the growth of the horns in Merinos with other breeds. Our Merino-males are all horned, a small part also of the females. They are the descendants of those Spanish Merinos which had been brought to Saxony in the last half of the 18^th. century.⁶ My flock is descended, also on the part of the mother, from this [illeg] Spanish immigration. In the Rambouillet and Negretti breeds it was said, that in the pure breed the ewes are not horned.⁷ But it is proved that even in Spain the ewes bear sometimes horns. With us about 3–5 percent of the ewes are horned, while the males are all so, except some few exceptions, which occur now very seldom. These not-horned rams (the so-called Kalben-böke)⁸ are not liked, properly speaking without reason.

The horns of the Merino rams are immediately after birth mostly present as small projections on the skull; they go on growing nearly equally as the whole animal. They are fully developed when the animal has attained its full growth, in the third year of its age. In the horned ewes the horns are also visible after birth but they remain small, about the 6^th. or 8^th. part of the weight of a male horn, the growth is nearly equal, in the same rate as the animal grows.

I tried to find if the formation of horns wants a larger amount of food; but all I found is, that the males want on the whole much more food than the ewes.

The castrated rams want less; but in these the horns are also often much smaller, so that I am inclined to think that the secretion or formation of the semen wants most of the food. In castrated animals all the other parts grow much quicker. Animals, on which the not-fleshy parts are covered with wool, are very difficult to breed and to keep so, and more difficult the male animals than the female and the castrated.

One observation is perfectly sure: that the horn of the male, as well as that of the female animal corresponds exactly to the nature of the whole animal, just as any other part. And this is the point which I should have liked to discuss with Mr Darwin.

While almost all breeders believe to be able to breed single parts or forms of single parts, I think the differences rest on illusion. The head of the English flesh-cattle is not absolutely smaller, but only so in relation to the greater amount of flesh on the fore part of the body, etc. etc.

Just the same holds good with the texture of the parts. Flesh, wool, skeleton, all that stands in close harmony.