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EUROPEAN AGRICULTURE. 



calf. The confidence with which some persons speak of what 

 can be done, and what they can do, is often excessive ; but what 

 has been accomplished by selection, by crossing, and by the 

 conjunction of peculiar properties, is surprising. There seems a 

 limit, beyond which, perhaps, no person can go. The particular 

 breed may be altered and improved, but an entirely new breed 

 cannot be produced ; arid, in every departure from the original, 

 there is a constant tendency to revert back to it. The stock of 

 the improved Durham cattle seems to establish this point. If we 

 have the true history of it, it is the result of a cross of a Tees- 

 water bull with a Galloway cow. The Teeswater or Yorkshire 

 stock are a large and coarse-boned animal ; the object of this 

 cross was to get a smaller bone and greater compactness. By at 

 tempting to carry this improvement, if I may so say, still further, 

 by breeding continually in and in, that is, with the members 

 of the same family, in a close degree of affinity, the power 

 of continuing the species seems to become extinct ; at least, it ap 

 proximates to such a result ; the race becomes deteriorated. On 

 the other hand, by wholly neglecting all selection, and without 

 an occasional good cross with an animal of some foreign blood, 

 there appears a tendency to go back to the large-boned, long- 

 legged animal, from which the improvement began. One point 

 seems admitted, that, since the days of Mr. C. Colling, the great 

 founder of what is called the improved short horns, though 

 the race has become diffused to an extraordinary extent, and 

 multitudes of fine animals are now produced where then there 

 were few, yet no higher excellence has been reached than that 

 to which he attained. The greatest stress is every where laid 

 upon purity of blood ; and yet it is rather an anomalous fact, in 

 this case, that Mr. Col ling s famous stock was the result of a 

 cross between a Teeswater bull and a Galloway cow ; that some 

 of the best animals in the country, for size, and fatness, and 

 milk, have been the progeny of a first cross with a different 

 breed ; and that an extreme limitation, in breeding, to the same 

 family has been almost invariably followed by the deterioration 

 of the stock. &quot; There are soveral instances of superior animals 

 bred in the closest affinity ; whilst, in a very great majority of 

 cases, the failure has been excessive and lamentable. It was no 

 torious that the stock got by Comet out of cows that were stran- 



