CATTLE HUSBANDRY. 35 



all their beauty of feature and form, and it has been observed 

 that in some of the counties of that country where poverty was 

 the greatest, and nourishment most insufficient and exclusive, 

 the inhabitants have become dwarfed in stature in the second 

 generation. By an intermixture with other blood in America, 

 sufficient food and a variety of it, wc already discern a great im- 

 provement in the appearance of the children of the Emerald Isle 

 amongst us, and the future will witness a yet more wonderful 

 transformation. The Chinese undoubtedly owe their ill-favored 

 countenances to an exclusive diet, meat (of large animals at 

 least) being a great rarity with them ; and we Yankees have 

 fallen away from the luxuriousness of our English ancestry, by 

 too close adherence to pork and pastry, irregular periods of eat- 

 ing, and allowing our children to be brought up on the indis- 

 criminate food we put on our tables, — gorging them with sweets 

 instead of giving them muscle and good constitutions by a liberal 

 allowance of oatmeal and bean porridge, good bread and butter, a 

 little meat, vegetables in abundance, and '•'■nopison things'" what- 

 ever. There is no country in the world where quack doctors 

 and dentists flourish as they do here, owing principally to bad 

 diet, and the hereditary tendency to decay bequeathed by our 

 parents, and noticeable in the early fading of the beauty of our 

 women, as well as in the decay of our masticators. 



From the formation of the cow we learn that grass (tender 

 grass) is her natural means of subsistence. And the nearer we 

 can get our fodder, wliether hay, straw, cornstalks or the like, to 

 the consistency of her natural food, so much the better for her 

 and for us who live by her. If she is to be kept on hay only, it 

 should be cut early, not overdried, and secured without the 

 sugary quality being washed out, which is an important element 

 in her food. When grass first springs above the surface of the 

 earth, the principal constituent of its early blades is water, — as 

 it rises higher into day, the deposition of a more indurated form 

 of carbon gradually becomes more considerable, — the sugar and 

 soluble matter at first increasing, then gradually diminisiiing, to 

 give way to tlie deposition of woody substance, and it is before 

 the last change, before it shapes into seed, that the grass should 

 be cut. 



But the difficulty of keeping a cow on hay alone, and keeping 

 up her quantity of milk, is, that it is not as tender as grass, and 



