262 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



The Ayrshires are hardy, easily kept, and good milkers — 

 perhaps as a race, better than any other — whole dairies aver- 

 aging from 2,000 to 2,400 quarts of milk a year to each cow, 

 and of a good quality. They will do very well on high keeping, 

 and on being fed, take on fat readily and easily, which is 

 evenly distributed with the lean, or well marbled, as butchers 

 call it ; three-year old steers dress from 700 to 850 pounds. 

 How they will do for workers, we do not know. They have 

 never been tried in this country, and where they originated 

 horses do the entire farm work. 



The Herefords make good working cattle, and make very good 

 beef, easily ; for milk they cannot be recommended. A friend of 

 ours, owning a Hereford cow, once said that he might as well 

 fill his pail with the blue sky of heaven, as to set it under a 

 Hereford cow. As a general thing, too, they are not good 

 handlers ; and we remember the recommendation of a fancy 

 farmer to us, when suggesting the thickness and hardness of 

 the hide " that it was a capital thick hide and would protect, 

 him in all weathers." 



Of all the different races, the Devon cattle are undoubtedly 

 the best, purely as working oxen. They have a quickness of 

 action, a degree of docility, and goodness of temper, and 

 stoutness, and honesty of work, to which many teams of horses 

 cannot pretend, and will exert their strength to the utmost and 

 stand many a dead pull, which few horses could be forced to 

 attempt. 



Their activity, too, has made them of great service and value 

 in their native county of Devonshire : during harvest time, and 

 in catching weather, they are sometimes trotted along with the 

 empty wagon, at the rate of six miles an hour, a degree of 

 speed which no other ox but the Devon has been able to stand. 

 Their beautiful forms, their bright red color, without a white 

 hair, their handsome high heads, with the delicate curving 

 horns, commend them to the eye of every one who has the least 

 fancy for a fine ox, and a longer acquaintance only develops 

 their great excellence. The Devon cows, as a general thing, 

 have never been reckoned first rate as milkers, probably not 

 equal to the Ayrshires. Probably, however, for the system of 

 breeding, which we here adopt, of raising for the great uses 



