132 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE 



cattle have come down to the present day — not, 

 however, without their Bakewell to estabHsh 

 them, and his successors to maintain them in 

 equiHbrium. 



The Aberdeen- Angus Bakewell was Hugh 

 Watson, the son of farmers and polled cattle 

 breeders on the borders of Forfar and Perth, 

 who, in 1 808, at nineteen years of age, got a farm 

 for himself and six of his father's " best and 

 blackest cows, along with a bull, as a nucleus for 

 an Angus doddie herd." Within a month or two 

 he went twenty miles north to Brechin, the great 

 market of those days, and bought '* the ten best 

 heifers and the best bull he could procure." And 

 more than half a century later, when his work 

 was done, Hugh Watson's cattle were almost, if 

 not entirely, descended from the cattle he began 

 with in 1808. 



How far Watson was driven to the system of 

 in-breeding by force of circumstances, and how 

 far by example, cannot be told ; but it must be 

 remembered that, being another unparalleled 

 judge, and having begun his herd with the best 

 he could find, it was afterwards difficult for him 

 to get other cattle as good as his own. It must 

 also be remembered that Charles Colling's Comet 

 was sold for a thousand guineas in the year 

 1810. 



By exhibiting the last three or four genera- 

 tions that led up to Hugh Watson's greatest bull, 



