264 AMERICAN CATTLE. 



season, not exceeding eight or ten services a week. He should 

 be kept stabled, or confined to a small yard or paddock, and well 

 and regularly fed, with reasonable daily exercise, by leading out 

 to walk, if stabled. If in a yard or paddock, he will exercise 

 himself. At three years he may have full service, a hundred 

 cows or more, without injury, and so on until he is a dozen 

 years old, if his virility last so long, which it will usually do, if 

 not early overworked. One perfect service of the bull to the 

 cow is as efficient as more. His resources should not be lavishly 

 expended. 



Some men have a strange notion that after a bull arrives at 

 the age of four or five years, he should be discarded. It is at 

 the age of four or five only, that the quality of his stock can be 

 proved. A very fine calf may turn out a poor thing at two or 

 three years old, and an unpromising calf may prove a first-rate 

 animal at the same age, as we have sometimes found; therefore 

 it is only at the age of four or five years that the stock of the bull 

 can be fairly tested. If it prove good, the longer he can be 

 used, the better, provided his vigor and stamina be retained. 

 Charles Ceiling's celebrated bull Favorite, (252, English Herd 

 Book,) was calved in 1793. In 1803, when ten years old, he 

 got Comet, (155, E. H. B.,) the famous 1,000 guinea bull; and 

 the next year, when eleven years old, he got North Star, (458, 

 E. H. B.,) another famous bull, both of them out of his own 

 daughter from his own mother, (the cow was both daughter and 

 sister to him,) and better cattle in their day did not exist 

 although here was cattle incest, and breeding in-and-in with a 

 vengeance, such as would astonish most of the blood cattle 

 breeders of the present clay at such temerity I "Favorite" was, 

 no doubt, an exception to the common short-horns of his time. 

 He was a bull of wonderful stamina and vigor, and probably 

 got more good stock than any bull of his generation. He also 

 got the famous "Durham Ox," and "The white heifer that trav- 



