{"id":10531,"date":"2016-05-28T08:53:00","date_gmt":"2016-05-28T15:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/?p=10531"},"modified":"2016-05-28T08:53:00","modified_gmt":"2016-05-28T15:53:00","slug":"three-centuries-of-merinos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/28\/three-centuries-of-merinos\/","title":{"rendered":"Three Centuries of Merinos"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Montbard,<\/a><\/p>\n

Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton was born three hundred years\u00a0ago today in Montbard, where his statue looks down over the city from the park named for his cousin and colleague Buffon.<\/p>\n

Daubenton’s accomplishments in natural history<\/a>\u00a0were considerable, his bibliography vast. Co-author of the first volumes of Buffon’s\u00a0Histoire naturelle<\/em>, he was also the first director of the new National Museum, and Cuvier himself gratefully acknowledged\u00a0Daubenton’s work in laying the foundations of comparative anatomy.<\/p>\n

But today, more than two centuries after his death in 1799, Daubenton is best remembered for one thing: his connection to the merino sheep<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Montbard,<\/a><\/p>\n

Alongside his other duties, Daubenton spent the better part of three decades breeding merino rams with French ewes<\/a>, hoping to produce a cross as hardy as the latter but with the fine, soft wool of the former. This was not a purely academic exercise. As Lac\u00e9p\u00e8de put it in Year X of the first Republic, with a nervous glance at England,<\/p>\n

success would result in lifting the heavy yoke of foreign competition\u00a0under which\u00a0our own industries\u00a0labor.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Similar political, scientific, and commercial interests led to the sheep crazes\u00a0of the early nineteenth century. For a brief time in the United States, merino rams were fetching more than a thousand dollars at auction, and there was widespread fear that the country’s entire wool manufactory would collapse under the strain.<\/p>\n

By then, though, Daubenton was at rest in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, leaving to future generations of scientists and natural historians a\u00a0shining\u00a0example<\/a> of those qualities we all could use more of:<\/p>\n

concentration, reflection, perseverance, the wise use of our time, and the unstinting application of our energies.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n