132 AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



ment by skillful men would, doubtless, have resulted in the 

 advancement of the native New England cow to a high standard 

 of beauty and profit, and the establishment of one or several 

 breeds of recognized and special merit, equal or superior in their 

 capacities for work and endurance to any that we now have. 



But the New England man and boy were different from their 

 fathers who had cleared away the forests and built stone walls 

 around their fields and pastures. Villages or cities were but a 

 few miles away, the steam whistle was within hearing and the 

 whole country was pulsating with the throbs of life and progres- 

 sion. They, too, were impatient, they could not wait. They 

 could not afford the time for the evolution of their animals by 

 the slow processes of care, breeding and selection. They turned 

 their eyes to Scotland, to Holland, to Jersey and Guernsey, the 

 homes of the then known dairy breeds, and pondered upon the 

 value of the blood of those animals for mingling with that of 

 their own creatures. 



They brought the Ayrshires — the true descendants of the Scot- 

 tish Highland cattle with their shaggy coats — from southern 

 Scotland. They went to the lowlands of Holland, to the home 

 of the black and white Holsteins. They went across the British 

 channel to Jersey and Guernsey, where basking in the sunshine 

 under the shelter of bank, copse and hedge they found the cows 

 that gave the richest and yellowest milk of any breed in existence, 

 and they brought them too, to rugged, cold New England. For 

 more than a century these breeds had all been bred for doing 

 special work. They had been refined until their capacities for 

 doing something else were practically eliminated from them. 

 The men who had made them what they were had become experts 

 because of contact with their work. When these animals came 

 to our New England farms they found new and strange sur- 

 roundings and associates. They throve and yielded profit to the 

 men who understood them, and surrounded them with conditions 

 as congenial as those which had served to cause their develop- 

 ment to the high plane which they occupied. In the hands of 

 indifferent farmers they proved disappointing because of the 

 violation of that law in animal husbandry which demands that 

 the conditions which caused the improvement of an animal must 

 be continued or it will revert to the lower plane from which it 

 started. 



