4 INTRODUCTION 



is so seldom favourable to intensive production of food from 

 the land that the practice is almost negligible. The beef which 

 the continental chef knows how to serve so well is practically 

 all cow-beef, with an occasional joint off a good young bull, or 

 meat from draught oxen, the oxen being fattened for slaughter 

 after a long life at the yoke. Mutton, as travellers know, is a 

 rare luxury on the table of any European country except our 

 own. Even with sheep the foreigner is not negligent of the dairy, 

 for much of the mutton he eats is the flesh of animals that have 

 been milked. Ewes' milk in our country is practically unknown 

 for any other purpose than the rearing of the lamb. It is quite 

 amusing to see the astonishment shown by some foreign agri- 

 culturists on hearing that we never milk sheep, and the corre- 

 sponding amazement displayed by our farmers on hearing of 

 such an anomaly. 



But while the foreigner consents practically to abstain from 

 good steer beef, he is not a little careful that his cow and bull 

 beef is of uniform, and of fairly good, quality. The huge cow- 

 market at Leeuwarden in the Friesland province of Holland 

 is a wonderful example of this. At the great cow-market held 

 at this great agricultural centre are to be seen vast quantities of 

 fine cows ready for slaughter. What strikes the Englishman 

 about the market when he visits it for the first time, is the 

 wonderful uniformity of the stock; row upon row, each con- 

 taining several dozen specimens of the cows of the country, are 

 all more or less exactly turned to the same pattern. The cattle 

 are all of the same type, not particularly good (the best cows in 

 an English market are undoubtedly better), but there is prac- 

 tically never a bad one. The cows are all fairly young, being 

 from seven to nine years old; a wastefully fat animal is never 

 seen, and they are practically all in the same stage of "finish," 

 what would be called "just good meat" in our home markets. 



The bulls are remarkable to us in one particular respect. 

 Practically all of them are about 30 months of age or a year 

 younger. An old bull is an exception, being just the odd one 

 who, by virtue of his breeding and appearance, has been selected 

 by one of the Associations for the Improvement of Cattle as 

 worth subsidizing; thus his services as a sire remain available 



