HISTORICAL TESTIMONY. 179 



ilies with which he has been most successful 

 pedigrees which the votaries of one or another 

 of the then existing fashions would have said 

 were very plain. Breeders were then, as now, 

 stumbling over that difficulty. There were any 

 number of wiseacres about to warn men against 

 this or that pedigree because it was plain or 

 unfashionable; but the so-called plain-bred 

 cattle were certainly good, and the fashionable 

 strains were far from always being so, and Mr. 

 Cruickshank was too good a judge and too 

 clear-headed a business man to be affected by 

 mere fine-spun theories. He had even so early 

 as this gotten a good hold upon the idea that 

 personal merit and descent from animals of the 

 same sort was the only bovine aristocracy 

 which was capable of enduring the wear and 

 tear of time, and making that his test he hewed 

 to the line. There was no iconoclasm or fanati- 

 cism in all this. He made no comments or 

 criticism on the follies of the day. While he 

 did not shrink from the most neglected stock 

 if they only showed a substantial pedigree and 

 that substance in the personal qualifications 

 which was a sine qua non with him, he yet was 

 always ready to recognize the good in the most 

 fashionable strains when it really existed, and 

 purchased and used some highly fashionable 

 bulls. In this he was in exact line with Mr. 

 Thomas Booth's most notable example. 



