REPORT ON BULLS. 



Fifty years ago as a little four year old boy lay kicking his 

 heels up on the hearthrug, he suddenly broke out with, " Grand- 

 pa was I a little baby once ?" " Yes my dear," answered Grand- 

 pa, looking up from his book. " Were you ever a little baby 

 Grandpa ?" " Certainly I was." This seemed to require a little 

 consideration, but it not unnaturally led up to the next question. 

 " Grandpa was everybody a baby once ?" " Yes, yes boy ! of 

 course they were." The old gentlemen went on with his read- 

 ing, thinking, no doubt, that his little torment had about exhaust- 

 ed the subject : but he found out his mistake when the young 

 inquisitor nailed him with " Grandpa, who dressed the first baby?" 



The man, whom this little boy grew into, was Chairman of 

 Committee on Classes eight and nine, at the last Fair of the 

 Hampshire Agricultural Society, and in setting out to write his 

 report on " Bulls and Calves," he is almost as much puzzled as 

 his Grandpa was, whether to begin with the calves or the bulls 5 

 as each appears at first sight to be a necessary antecedent, as well 

 as complement of the other. 



Not, however, having committed himself to the assertion that 

 " everybody was a baby once ; " he resorts to the generally re- 

 ceived impression that when God made the beasts of the field, 

 as related in the first chapter of Genesis, he made them all of 

 adult age ; and, hence concluding that the first Male of the Bo- 

 vine race was a bull, he gives the bulls the precedence in his re- 

 port. 



Owing, doubtless, to the unfavorable weather, there were only 

 seven entries of bulls, comprising three Jerseys, two Holsteins, 

 one shorthorn, and one Hereford ; and I think we should not be 

 far out of the way in accepting the relative number of the ani- 



