THE MODERN ENGLISH BREEDS OF PIGS. 69 



" 'General,' bred by Mr. Wyley, sold to Mr. Mackintosh, 

 of London, and hired by H.R.H. Prince Albert, the Earl 

 of Ducie, and Lord Wenlock, and was the sire of two 

 pens of pigs, the property of H.R.H. Prince Albert, that 

 obtained the first prize at a Smithfield Christmas Show. 



"It may, therefore, safely be assumed that all the best 

 white pigs of modern times have been bred from York- 

 shire or Cumberland and white Leicesters, or both ; and 

 many breeds, such as Middlesex, Coleshill, etc., may be 

 dismissed as mere variations of the white small Yorkshire. 



"Mr. G. Mangles, of Givendale, near Ripon, Mr. Brown 

 writes me, was one of the first to cultivate the cross of 

 the York-Cumberlands." 



THE MIDDLE OB MEDIUM YORKSHIRE BREED (Fig. 18). 



"The Yorkshire medium or middle breed," says Mr. 

 Sidney, " is a modern invention of Yorkshire pig-breeders, 

 and perhaps the most useful and the most popular of the 

 white breeds, as it unites, in a striking degree, the good 

 qualities of the large and the small. It has been produced 

 by a cross of the large and the small York, and the Cum- 

 berland, which is larger than the small York. Like the 

 large whites, they often have a few pale-blue spots on the 

 skin, the hair on these spots being white. All white 

 breeds have these spots more or less, and they often in- 

 crease in number as the animal grows older. 



"It was not until 1851 that the merits of this breed were 

 publicly recognized at a meeting of the * Keighley Agri- 

 cultural Society,' when, the judges having called the at- 

 tention of the stewards to the fact that several superior 

 sows, which were evidently closely allied to the small 

 breed, had been exhibited in the large-breed class, the 

 aspiring intruders were, by official authority, withdrawn. 



" They included the since celebrated c Sontag,' * Jenny 



