We would incite the attention of our citizens to this important discovery; for although the Spanish missionaries, in 1697, made mention of this sheep, and it is again noticed in Venegas' History of California[1], yet these accounts were discredited. It is to captain Lewis to whom belongs the honour of having been the first to assure his countrymen, by the exhibition of a genuine specimen, that the animal does exist. How subservient to the wants and pleasures of mankind it may be rendered by domestication, we cannot at present declare; but there is room for conjecture, that the introduction of this new species of a race of quadrupeds immemorially ranked among the most valuable of the gifts of the Creator, will confer a lasting benefit upon the agricultural and manufacturing interests of the community.
Since writing the foregoing, I have seen the three first volumes of the Nouveau Dictionnare d'Histoire Naturelle, which work is now publishing in Paris; and in the article Antelope I find a description of an American quadruped, which is in the collection of the Linnean society of London. This description appears to have been extracted from a memoire, read before the Philomatique Society of Paris, by M. de Blainville, wherein the author proposes a new arrangement of the ruminants with hollow and persistent horns, and a subdivision of the Genus Antilope; and classes the above animal under the name of Rupicapra Americana. (Bulletin de la Societe' Philomatique, 1816, p. 80.) As I have not the satisfaction of seeing the Bulletin, I must be content with the information conveyed in the article in the Nouveau Dictionnaire. The speciment is said to be of the bigness of a middling sized goat; the
- ↑ Vol. I. p. 36. English translation, London, 1759.
