20 BRITISH DAIRYING. 



The admission has had to be made, and regretfully made, 

 that the milk-yielding capacity of many families of pedigree 

 shorthorns was deliberately and intentionally reduced, not to 

 say sacrificed, and for a purpose, viz., to maintain the " con- 

 dition " that is, the fatness and fleshiness of the cows. This 

 led down to the inevitable loss of popularity which bulls from 

 these families sustained in the estimation of practical dairy 

 farmers, who had been in the habit of buying them, and so 

 after a time came a collapse of the inflated values which had 

 astonished the world in the roaring seventies. During the 

 period of inflation, intrinsic value had no connection whatever 

 with the prices fetched by fashionably-bred Shorthorns prior to 

 the eighties. The period was one of inflation in many things, 

 but in nothing, perhaps, to such an extent as in pedigree Short- 

 horn cattle. It was the misfortune and not the fault of these 

 noble cattle that they became identified with so much of what 

 can hardly be distinguished from gambling, for it led to their 

 being bred and trained to give up one of the chief functions coin ? 

 cident with maternity, viz., the maintenance of their offspring. 

 In the interests the best and real interests of the best all- 

 round breed of cattle the world has yet produced, it is to be 

 hoped that this sort of thing will not again be carried far in the 

 direction of extremes, and that milking capacity may continue 

 to be cultivated along with other qualities toward which the 

 breed has shown a striking aptitude. The breed has ample 

 merit in various ways, and will now, we hope, work out its 

 destiny without let or hindrance. 



Milk versus Beef. 



The ancient reputation for milk which the Shorthorns pos- 

 sessed belongs to a period when beef was at present Australian 

 prices, when milk was the chief merit of a cow, when professional 

 graziers did not exist; when barren cows were worth next to 

 nothing in the springtime of the year, and when beef was not 

 by any means so general an article of food as it has become in 

 our own days. It is, indeed, owing to the steady and rapid 



