Alexander Bell's Sheep

The most remarkable sheep since the time of Jason the Argonaut nibbled, stared, bleated last week in a new home at Middlebury, Vt., where they are now beginning the third chapter of their careers, in the care of the U.S. Bureau of Animal Industry. Though they do not have golden fleece, they may be almost as valuable to U.S. farmers, wool-wearers and mutton-eaters. Their unique characteristics:

1) They bring forth twins in four out of five births, which is two to eight times as often as twinning among ordinary flocks of sheep.

2) They produce enough milk through enough functional nipples--four or more--to feed their twins. Most other sheep have only two nipples, which can scarcely nourish twins and which thus militates against a race of twin-bearers.

Idea of making two sheep grow where only one grew before first occurred to Inventor Alexander Graham Bell (telephone), who spent the last 30 years of his life and some $250,000 on the project. In 1886, summering with his family in Nova Scotia, Bell bought an ewe for his children to play with. When they returned next season, there were two sheep--a modest increase indeed, Bell thought, considering that young pigs were usually produced by the dozen, kittens and puppies by the half dozen. If sheep were only one-sixth as prolific as pigs, the poverty of his shepherd neighbors, who grazed their flocks among Nova Scotia's bleak hills, would be greatly relieved.

So Bell studied the life history of sheep, concluded that the milk problem preceded the twinning problem, offered shepherds fancy prices for ewes with more than two functional nipples. First year he assembled 16 multinippled sheep, began his selective breeding. Not without trouble-foxes, dogs and winter winds killed many of his flock, and an eager aide slaughtered and slit open one of the best ewes to see in advance if she was bearing twins. By 1914 the flock averaged well over six nipples apiece, and Bell then concentrated on breeding for twins.

At Bell's death in 1922 his son-in-law, Plant Explorer David Fairchild, turned the flock over to Professor Ernest Ritzman of the University of New Hampshire, an expert breeder who had already developed a superior type of sheep combining the better features of fine-wooled Rambouillets and meaty Southdowns. Since Bell's sheep, for all their twins and nipples, were neither very meaty nor very fleecy, Ritzman began crossing the two unusual stocks. At last years end his work was finished, and his retirement neared, so he turned the flock over to Federal stock breeders at Middlebury.

There Geneticist Ralph Phillips will breed the animals toward genetic stability, so that their characteristics will persist when they are released to U.S. farmers, who now tend some 50,000,000 sheep.

Doubled & Redoubled. The fecundity of sheep can be doubled yet again, reports Monthly Science News, which arrived last week in the U.S. from England. U.S. sheep usually ovulate and are fertile only in the fall, can produce but one crop of lambs each year. But they can now be made to ovulate a second time when injected with an egg-ripening hormone produced in the anterior pituitary gland near the base of the brain. Ewes thus treated have already given birth twice yearly at the School of Agriculture at Cambridge, England. The egg-ripening hormone was discovered by Drs. Philip E. Smith and Earl T. Engle of Columbia. It was impossible to obtain it in useful quantities until it was discovered abundantly in the blood of mares in their 40th to 90th days of pregnancy.

Injected at certain times during the cycle of ovulation, this hormone also induces the production of two to 30 eggs in such beasts as cows, horses and sheep which normally cast but one offspring at a time. Thus increased is the chance that a cow will produce twins (now one chance in 224 in the beef breeds) or even quintuplets.

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