100 YALE AGRICULTURAL LECTURES. 



comparative development. Such conditions, however, are not 

 within either the reach, or the inclination of all, and that may, 

 therefore, be safely defined as the best breed, either of cattle 

 or of any other race of animals, whose services or flesh are use 

 ful to us which attains the greatest excellence compatible 

 with the position it is to occupy and the treatment it is to re 

 ceive. Thus, the requirements of East and West, North and 

 South may vary widely as to details, while all might precisely 

 coincide in the general desire to produce the heaviest flesh 

 upon each carcase most compactly and quickly. 



The importance of this point becomes apparent when we see 

 a farmer induced to try some improved breed, and meeting 

 with the failure due to his ill-treatment or simple neglect a 

 failure which he is sure to charge upon the " humbug book- 

 farming notions" of the day. There need be no hesitation in 

 saying that the most highly improved of foreign breeds are not 

 adapted for the use of the majority of our farmers, and that we 

 shall naturalize among ourselves breeds that may justly be re 

 garded as " the best," only as we learn to appreciate and treat 

 them better. 



The question then arises, What is the true course for our 

 formers to take ? a question which was answered by references 

 to the observations made by the speaker abroad, and by a 

 quotation from "Morton's Cyclopedia" the advice derived 

 from both being to the end that every farmer should carefully 

 select the females from which he is to breed, no matter what 

 their mixture of native or foreign blood, and that he should 

 never employ a parent of the other sex which did not possess 

 well concentrated merits that would be quite certainly impart 

 ed to his progeny. " It is here that pedigree becomes of actual 

 money's worth to the farmer." Concentrated qualities in the 

 bull are those whatever the degree in which the particular in 

 dividual possesses them that are hereditary in the stock from 

 which he springs. In selecting a bull by the eye alone, personal 

 merits may be chosen, but the character of the progeny will 



