Preface to the Fourth Edition. 



DURING the twenty- four years that have elapsed since the 

 last edition of this book was published the advance in 

 goat-keeping has been most marked ; and the improvement 

 in the culture of the goat as a source of milk has been 

 manifest not in England alone, for we find the same 

 movement in progress to some extent in France and Bel- 

 gium, and more particularly in some of our Colonies and 

 in the United States. In America indeed a stimulus has 

 been given to goat- keeping in a way to which we in 

 England are as yet strangers. Encouraged by the success 

 following upon the introduction of the Angora goat into 

 that country, where the mohair industry is now well 

 established, the authorities of the U.S.A. Department of 

 Agriculture at Washington have taken measures in recent 

 years to further the " Milch Goat Industry." With this 

 object, representatives of the Department were deputed to 

 visit Europe in order to make personal investigation and 

 to collect information which was subsequently published 

 as a bulletin by the " Bureau of Animal Industry " (in 



Goat authorities on the Continent have been similarly 

 engaged of late in writing treatises on this subject. In 

 France the pen of M. Joseph Crepin, a well-known advo- 

 cate of goat-keeping, has been busy, not only in various 

 periodicals, but on his extensive book " La Chevre," pub- 

 lished in 1906, which deals at length with the various breeds 



