146 HISTORY OF THE SHORT-HORNS. 



land (1940), by Belvedere; or, still thirty years afterwards, as did 

 Richard Booth, culminating in Commander-in-Chief (21452), by 

 Velasco and all of them with cows to match ? And yet, with all 

 this emphasis, we do not say that there have not since been equally 

 good bulls as these, and cows also, bred in both England and Amer- 

 ica; but they have not yet achieved the notoriety of the others, 

 although a future day may prove that some of them do excel even 

 Comet, Duke of Northumberland, or Commander-in-Chief. 



The critical reader may here make a note, and accuse us of writ- 

 ing up the Bates and Booth blood of cattle. Not a word of it. We 

 only state facts that cannot and will not, on mature examination, be 

 contradicted. Almost every herd of note, in either England or 

 America, has more or less of thfce bloods in their veins. In no well- 

 bred Short-horns whatever can be traced so many crosses back as 

 into the bull Favorite (252), bred by Charles Colling. His blood was 

 the foundation of the bulls of the elder Booth, afterwards of Bates, 

 in both bulls and cows, and also many other of the contemporary, 

 and through them of numerous later English and American herds. 

 Let the pedigrees be traced and the fact will so prove. 



If the brothers Colling, one in his thirty, and the other in his forty 

 years' career of breeding, were pronounced by their contemporaries 

 to be "improvers," why not the elder Booths and Bates, Mason, Lord 

 Althorpe, and numerous others of the elder, and their younger fol- 

 lowers, making their original selections from the Colling bloods, and 

 appropriating the best cows they could secure from others, and breed- 

 ing them with skill, adhering almost throughout to the original blood, 

 and their better qualities have been improvers also ? Charles Colling 

 may not, during his life-time, have bred a finer one than the Stanwick 

 Cow (his original Duchess), or the " beautiful Lady Maynard " as 

 he himself acknowledged which he bought of his elder contempo- 

 rary, Mr. Maynard ; but he had the sagacity to keep their blood as 

 compact as possible by breeding in-and-in their progeny to a depth 

 and endurance which stamped it almost in perpetuity through the 

 successive bulls and heifers proceeding from them, thus transmitting 

 their qualities down to present generations. The elder Booth copy- 

 ing from him, and procuring Colling bulls, which he used upon cows 

 of his own selection for their superior merits from other breeders, did 

 the same, and so following, did Bates, only that the latter had the 

 good fortune to obtain some of the Colling cows, which Booth did 

 not ; the latter, as we have already stated, selecting his original cows 

 from neighboring herds, looking only to their good qualities, without 



