118 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



ignorance. My principal olijcct is to ask a question, which I 

 think is of great practical interest to us, both as breeders of, and 

 dealers in cattle, and as persons intimately connected with the 

 management of our agricultural societies. 



The question is asked me every year (and I suppose it is 

 asked most of those here), what, for all the practical purposes 

 of dairy stock, more particularly, w^e should call a pure-bred 

 animal ? I suppose that the Professor is informed as to what is 

 the proper rule on this subject. I took note of what he in- 

 formed us in regard to the mixture of the Arabian and English 

 breeds of horses, and also of the German sheep. But I was 

 surprised to find, upon a visit to the Dublin Model School this 

 summer, that Mr. Baldwin, the manager of that institution, who 

 is one of her Majesty's commissioners of education for Ireland, 

 laid down the rule, on the authority of the Royal Agricultural 

 Society, as I understood him, that crossing to the sixtli genera- 

 tion was considered pure blood, for all the purposes of an agri- 

 cultural show. He may have said tlie fourth, but his statement 

 certainly was not anything beyond the sixth. 



Now, as I have said, we all hear that question raised, as 

 breeders or as managers of agricultural shows, and I, for one, 

 would like to be informed whether, if an animal is exhibited at 

 a show with all the marks of the breed which it purports to 

 represent, and is excellent in those qualities, we should consider 

 it pure blood or not, if it is an animal of the sixth, seventh or 

 eighth degree. 



Of course, I understand that such an animal is not, mathe- 

 matically speaking, of pure blood ; I do not claim that it is ; 

 but I want to know where the impurity ends and where the 

 purity begins, for practical purposes, or whether it begins or 

 not, and. what should be our rule, as practical men on that 

 subject. 



The CiiAmMAN. So far as we are concerned, practically, as 

 farmers, the rule is a very simple one. We know, practically, 

 that the farmers in other countries have established certain 

 recognized breeds of cattle and horses. There is no question 

 about that. They are produced ready to our hands. All we 

 have got to do is to provide ourselves with them. "We have 

 not established any breed here in America. We have secured 

 certain local breeds, conliued sometimes to a town or county, 



