The Audubon Societies 439 



cesses of government. In these Bulletins is a simple, clear presentation of facts which 

 every American citizen and every future citizen of America should know. The Com- 

 missioner of Education at Washington, D. C, has charge of these Bulletins. They 

 should be widely studied and discussed. 



Those who have taken up the matter of the world's supply of cereals, such 

 as wheat, for example, will have discovered how complex the subject is, whether 

 viewed from the point of natural and cultivated varieties, distribution and 

 demand from country to country, and by race to race, or the gigantic business 

 mechanism which controls the production and trade-distribution of this prac- 

 tically world-wide essential of human diet. 



A second important subject is the meat-supply of the world. It is true that 

 many people, not vegetarians by habit, are learning to eat less meat and more 

 vegetables, but meat has become so favored an article of diet that, generally 

 speaking, it is an essential food. There are important substitutes for meat 

 which we should learn to use, but so long as meat remains on our menus, it is 

 well to study its history and use. 



Familiar as we are with the appearance of cooked meat on the table, and 

 of "cuts" of meat in the market, perhaps no one of us could correctly locate or 

 describe the most notable meat-producing centers of the world or properly 

 explain the origin of our present meat-supply. We have heard, perhaps, of the 

 vast cattle-ranges and large ranches which a generation ago occupied the great 

 plains of the United States; we may have pictured rather dimly in our minds 

 the rich pampas-lands of South America or the far-straying flocks of Australia, 

 but could any of us write down or mark on a map the places where beef, pork, 

 and mutton are produced in large quantities? Could we name even a few of the 

 different stocks of cattle, sheep, and hogs which furnish our meat-supply, or 

 tell where they come from? When you see a cow, a lamb, or pig, does it occur 

 to you that each has a history worth looking into, and not only a history with 

 reference to your food-supply, but also a history in connection with animal 

 creation and human civilization? 



You may sometime have had on your table a thick, juicy steak which you 

 heard described as a piece of "Texas beef." Could you have watched Columbus 

 loading his frail ships for a second voyage to America in 1493, or, later, colonists 

 starting for the newly discovered West Indies, you might have seen the ancestors 

 of this so-called Texan stock being taken from the Old World to the New, 

 where they spread partly in domesticated and partly in wild state, at last reach- 

 ing the mainland, both north and south of the Isthmus of Panama. By 1525 

 this stock had reached Vera Cruz, Mexico, and thence doubtless found its way 

 gradually into Texas. Travelers and settlers returning to the Old World, 

 tradition tells us, carried the native Wild Turkey of North America to Spain, 

 whence it probably became domesticated as far north as Great Britain, and was 

 in later times retaken to America by colonists who very likely knew nothing of 

 its origin. In 1836, Sir William Jardine, Baronet of Scotland, wrote: "The 



