DURING the past two years three experiments were carried out to determine the feasibility of estimating the specific gravity of live sheep by water displacement. This work was stimulated by the reports of high correlations between carcass specific gravity and the chemical composition of the carcass published by numerous authors and summarized in ref. 1. Moreover, recent work2 emphasizes that subjective methods of estimating the proportion of fafc in the carcasses of lambs are unsatisfactory.