"SMALL IN SIZE, GREAT IN VALUE" 185 



the hall of his house were arranged skeletons of his most celebrated 

 animals ; from the walls hung joints, preserved in pickle, which 

 illustrated such points as smaUness of bone or thickness of fat. As 

 there was no inn m the village, he seems to have kept open house 

 for his visitors. He was never married. In his kitchen he enter- 

 tained Russian princes, French and German royal dukes, British 

 peers, and sightseers of every degree. Yet he never altered the 

 routine of his daily life. " Breakfast at eight ; dinner at one ; 

 supper at nine ; bed at eleven o'clock ; at half-past ten, let who 

 would be there, he knocked out his last pipe." Very large sums of 

 money passed through his hands. Yet, if the entry in the Gentle- 

 man's Magazine ^ refers to him, he was bankrupt in 1776, and so 

 lavish was his hospitahty that he is said to have died in poverty .^ 



In the treatment of Uve-stock for the butcher Bakewell's object 

 was to breed animals which weighed heaviest in the best joints 

 and most quickly repaid the cost of the food they consumed. He 

 sought to discover the animal which was the best machine for 

 turning food into money. " Small in size and great in value," 

 or the Holkham toast of " Symmetry well covered," was the motto 

 of his experiments. In his view the essentials were the valuable 

 joints, and he swept away as non-essentials all the points on which 

 fashion or prejudice had hitherto concentrated, such as head, neck, 

 horn, leg, or colour. The^points which he wished to develop and 

 perpetuate were beauty combined with utiHty of form, quaHty of 

 flesh, and propensity to fatness. To attain these objects he struck 

 out a new line for himseK. Crossing was then understood to mean 

 the mixture of two ahen breeds, one of which was relatively inferior. 

 Bakewell adopted a different principle, because he regarded this 

 form of crossing as an adulteration rather than as an improvement. 

 He bred in-and-in, using not merely animals of the same native 

 breed and line of descent, but of the same family. He thus secured 

 the union of the finest specimens of the breed which he had chosen 

 as the best, selected for the possession of the points which he 

 wished to reproduce or strengthen. 



^ In the Gent. Mag. for Nov. 1776, appears the following entry in the list 

 of bankrupts : " R. Bakewell, Dishley, Leicestersh. dealer." (p. 531). 



2 Other contemporary references to Bakewell, besides those quoted, will 

 be found in the Gent. Mag. vols. Ixiii. pt. ii. p. 792, and Ixv. pt. ii. pp. 9G9-70 ; 

 Marshall's Midland Counties, vol. i. pp. 292-493 etc. ; Annals of Agriculture, 

 vol. vi. (1786), pp. 466-98 ; Arthur Young's Husbandry of Three Famous 

 Farmers (1811); George CuUey's Observations on Live Stock (1786). 



