56 FROM AN EASY CHAIR 



a most serious branch of scientific knowledge, held by 

 many people (of whom I am one) to be of more 

 importance to statesmen, politicians, and philanthropists 

 than any other kind of knowledge, and yet almost 

 absolutely neglected and completely ignored except by 

 our farmers and horticulturists. When examining in 

 turn the splendid animals at Islington I have felt 

 indignant that it should be not improbable that, owing 

 to ignorance and neglect in official quarters, the long 

 matured traditions and built-up skill of our cattle- 

 breeders will be destroyed, crushed out of existence by 

 huge, devastating capitalist " combines." Soon we shafl 

 not get the beef we wish for, but we shall have to take 

 whatever inferior stuff the giant monopolist chooses to 

 force on us or go without ! Our wonderful stock, so 

 patiently and happily bred, the envy of the world, will 

 disappear, and our breeders forget their art. We 

 shall none of us in Britain know more about prime beef, 

 roasts, grills, and marrow-bones than do the people of 

 Europe or the eaters of terrapin and soft-shelled 

 crabs. 



It is wonderful that man, by deliberate choice in 

 selecting the sires and dams, has been able to produce 

 such widely-different races as the short-horn, the High- 

 land and the Sussex breed, and not only to produce them, 

 but to keep them there generation after generation. In 

 Nature, no such deviations are allowed her motto is 

 " One species, one shape," which is only relaxed so as to 

 allow a few geographical varieties. It is man who 

 makes all these strange breeds, just as he has made such 

 a queer, irregular, varied lot of creatures from the 

 human stock. Withdraw once and for all man's 

 guiding " intelligence," or perversity, if you choose so 

 to call it, and all these cattle would in a few hundred 

 years revert to one form, nearly (but not quite) the 

 same as that they came from. So, too, the Sheep ; so, 

 too, the Pigs. And man himself, if one could poison 



