144 HISTORY OF THE SHORT-HORNS. 



CHAPTER VI. 



MR. BATES' INFLUENCE ON THE SHORT-HORNS DID HE IMPROVE 



THEM ? 



THAT a sagacious, intelligent man, devoting nearly sixty years of 

 an active life to the breeding of a favorite race of animals, divested 

 of family cares, enthusiastically attached to his stock, selecting his 

 original herd from the best blood of the country, and concentrating 

 all the energies and skill at his command to their highest develop- 

 ment, should not succeed in improving their qualities to a greater or 

 less extent, would prove him to be a dullard, or that he worked upon 

 a race of animals incapable of any further development. Neither of 

 these conclusions will be credited to the labors of Mr. Bates, or 

 charged to the qualities of so fine a race of cattle as the Short-horns. 

 During his life no one had greater opportunities to know the origin 

 and lineage of every noted Short-horn in England. In his younger 

 days he was contemporary, acquainted with, and on friendly terms 

 with most, if not all, the substantial and reputable breeders of the 

 country, and after the Collings had retired no one probably knew the 

 pedigrees of the earlier herds of the country any better than, if so 

 well as, himself. In his own private copy of the first volume of 

 Coates' Herd Book, he made extended notes of the ancestry of many 

 of the earlier cattle therein recorded, beyond what the printed pedi- 

 grees contained, and these notes, of the bulls, we have had the privi- 

 lege of copying into our own. At the close of his life he probably 

 knew more about Short-horns than any man in England. He had 

 seen Hubback, Foljambe, Bolingbroke, Favorite, and Comet, and 

 many of their contemporaries, male and female, together with the other 

 most noted bulls and cows of his time. He had been intimate 

 with the herds of the Maynards, the Wetherells, the Booths, the 

 Wrights, the Charges, the Masons, the Hutchinsons, as well as their 

 many younger contemporaries. He knew the superior as well as 

 inferior qualities which their herds possessed. Probably no man in 

 England was a better judge of cattle than he, and at his death he left 



