8 ROBERT BAKEWELL. 



He was born in 1726 of respectable parents; his father 

 was an agriculturist, well advanced in agricultural lines, and 

 men of the family had repeatedly held positions of responsi- 

 bility and honor in the Government. Bake well himself entered 

 on agricultural work with enthusiasm. He was well educated, 

 an anatomist of skill, was fairly well to do, and possessed the 

 faculty of being able to shape a definite ideal in his own 

 mind, the persistence necessary to the accomplishment of 

 any great work, and the ability to select animals approaching 

 the nearest to his ideal. He was the first to breed for a 

 definite type, and his aim was a strictly utilitarian one. He 

 desired to produce sheep and cattle that would produce the 

 greatest amount of prime flesh at the earliest possible age, 

 and to produce cart horses specially suited to perform heavy 

 work. His knowledge of anatomy was a great aid in his 

 breeding, for he was enabled to see the correlations between 

 form and function. In his breeding operations he depended 

 solely on individual merit and bred "the best to the best," 

 regardless of family relationship. As he began with the best 

 animals he could select, his policy soon led to close in-breed- 

 ing. The results, in all probability, were better than had 

 been hoped for. The cattle of that day were coarse and slow 

 in maturing; close in-breeding refined them in bone and in 

 general conformation, and also led to earlier maturity. Long 

 continued, it leads to degeneration and sterility, but used as 

 Bakewell used it, it proved a powerful factor in improving 

 the coarse type of stock of that day; and the concentration 

 of the blood of animals showing desirable characteristics, gave 

 his animals strong prepotency when crossed with animals of 

 the common type. Such in brief was his work. He effected 

 notable improvement in the long-horned cattle, Leicester 

 sheep, and English cart horse; but his claims to fame rest 

 upon the principles of breeding he established. He brought 

 order out of chaos, and his pupils have produced our modern 

 types of live stock. 



In conclusion, we see that the Bos taurus is the only 

 species of ox of direct importance to us; that it is descended 

 from an extinct form, the Bos primigenius; that the process 

 of domestication has extended long beyond historic periods; 

 but. that real improvement by artificial selection has come 

 chiefly in the last 200 years. 



