Long before Mendel's ground-breaking discoveries about heredity, sheep breeders in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were transforming the appearance and qualities of their livestock by combining various traits of body and wool into new patterns. Exploiting what were then novel procedures - individual trait selection, close inbreeding and progeny testing - they demonstrated inheritance from both sexes and showed how it could be stabilized. This remarkable book examines how sheep breeding contributed to the early knowledge of heredity and how the theory was pursued during the early...