74 PEDIGREE BREEDING 



in the proportional amount of meat to bone and in the pro- 

 portion of valuable "cuts" to second- and third-class species 

 of "joints," but all the edible parts, the lean meat, or muscle, 

 and fat were greatly improved in quality. This question of 

 "quality" will, on account of its economic importance, be 

 referred to again. To all these improvements the early breeders 

 of Shorthorns added another very valuable, and, as regards 

 their early-owned cattle, quite distinctive attribute of useful- 

 ness, namely, the faculty of rapid growth or early maturity. 

 BakewelPs development of this faculty in his Longhorn 

 cattle had seemed miraculous when compared with the normal 

 growth of oxen before his time; the Shorthorn-breeders were 

 not one degree behind the pioneer in this respect. 



What happened to the milking capacities of the breed, while 

 this transformation in fleshing quality and early maturity was 

 going on, has never been quite clear to me. It seems certain 

 that the bulk of the Teeswater or Holderness herds, among the 

 individual members of which the improvers found their original 

 breeding material, were very famous for their milking qualities. 

 There are many testimonials, independent of any breeders * 

 influence and quite separate in their source, in the Annals of 

 Agriculture 1 and other literature of the time giving evidence 

 of immense yields of milk from the " foundation" cattle, and it is 

 probable that their successors, the improved Shorthorn, did not 

 milk so well. On the other hand, there is no evidence whatever, 

 quite the contrary 2 , that the milking qualities had almost dis- 

 appeared; and to suggest that they had vanished to the same 

 degree as was the case some hundred years after the Collings 

 brothers were breeding seems to me ridiculous. The fact 

 probably was that no Shorthorn-breeder paid very particular 

 attention to the amount of milk his cattle gave. He seemed, 

 however, to assume that his cows would, by virtue of their 

 inherited characteristic, give an average of about 800 gallons 

 a year without special attention being paid to the selection of 

 stock for their pail-filling qualities. It was in beef that his 



1 Annals of Agriculture and other Useful Arts, 1790 to 1797, by Arthur 

 Young, Esq., F.R.S. 



2 Sinclair, loc. cit. 



