104 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



cribed to the practice." W. C. Spooner, V. S., speaking of Mr. 

 Barford's slieep says, " His flock is remarkably healthy and his 

 rams successful, but his sheep are small." 



Mr. Charles Colling, after he procured the famous bull Hubback, 

 selected cows most likely to develop his special excellencies, and 

 from the progeny of these he bred very closely. From that day to 

 this, the Short-horns as a general thing, have been very. closely 

 bred,* and the practice has been carried so far, the selections not 

 always being the most judicious possible, as to result in delicacy of 



* Probably few Avho have not critically examined the facta regarding close breed- 

 ing in the improved Short-horns are aware of the extent to which it has been and is 

 still carried. On the 28th of March, 18G0, at a sale of Short-horns at Milcote, near 

 Stratfoi'd upon Avon (England) thirty-one descendants of a cow called "Charmer," 

 bred of Mr. Colling's purest blood, and praised in the advertisement as " capital 

 milkers and very prolific, not having been pampered," sold for £2,140, averaging 

 about $'350 each, and many of them were calves. The stock was also praised as 

 " ofiTering to the public as much of the pure blood of ' Favorite' as could be found 

 in any herd." With reference to this sale, which also comprised other stock, the 

 Agricultural Gazette, published a few days previous, had some remarks from which 

 the following is extracted: 



" It is unquestionable that the ability of a cow or bull to transmit the merit either 

 may possess does in a great degree depend uiDon its having been inherited by them 

 thi'ough a long line of ancestry. Nothing is more remarkable than the way La 

 ■which the earlier improvers of the Short-horn bi-eed carried out their belief in this. 

 They were indeed driven by the comi^arative fewness of well bred animals to a 

 repeated use of the same sire on successive generations of his own begetting, while 

 breeders now-a-days have the advantage of fifty diiferent strains and families from 

 "which to choose the materials of their herd, but whctlier it were necessity or choice 

 it is certain that the pedigree of no pure bred Short-hum can be traced without 

 very soon reaching many an illustration of the way in wliich ' breeding in-and-in' 

 has influenced its character, deepened it, made it permanent, so that it is handed 

 down unimpaired and even strengthened in the liands of tlie judicious breeder. 

 What an extraordinary influence has thus been exerted by a single bull on the for- 

 tunes of the Short-horn breed ! There is hardly a single choice pure-bred Shorts 

 horn that is not descended from ' Favorite' (252) and not only descended in a 

 single line — but descended in fifty difierent lines. Take any single animal, and this 

 bull shall occur in a dozen of its preceding generations and repeatedly up to a hun- 

 dred times ! in the animals of some of the more distant generations. His influence 

 is thus so paramount in the breed that one fancies he has created it and that the 

 present cliaracter <,)f the wliole breed is <lue the 'accidental' appearance of an ani- 

 mal of extraordinary endowments on the stage in tlie beginning of the present 

 century. And yet tliis is not so; — he is himself an illustration of the breeding in- 

 and-in system — his sire and dam having been half brotlier and sister, both got by 

 ' Foljambe.' And this breeding in-and-in has handed down Ins influence to the pres- 

 ent time in an extraordinary degree. Take for instance, the cow ' Charmer,' from 

 which as will be seen elsewhere, no fewer tlian thirty-one descendants are to be sold 

 next Wednesday. She had of course two immediate parents, four jn-ogenitors in 



