206 CATTLE-BREEDING. 



ability of those persons engaged in multiply- 

 ing this form of product to maintain the ex- 

 cellence once given it ; for it is obvious that 

 if a product is valued for the labor expended 

 on it by nine workmen, and when passed into 

 the hands of a tenth, he, by his want of skill, 

 not only does not improve the article but spoils 

 that which was done by his predecessors, he 

 has decreased rather than increased the value 

 of the article. His labor has, as the mathe- 

 maticians say, a negative value ; he has added 

 work but not productive labor. So an unskill- 

 ful breeder may wreck the work of many gen- 

 erations of skillful breeders, and at a stroke 

 reduce cattle of the highest quality, in their 

 descendants, to the rank of mere beef cattle. 

 This is no more labor than the muscular exer- 

 tion required to knock the head of a statue by 

 Praxitiles from the shapely shoulders would 

 be labor. It requires real, productive labor to 

 maintain the excellence produced originally 

 with so much difficulty in our improved breed. 

 Not only so but the females are the sole 

 source of pure descent when mated with pure 

 males their production is limited to not more 

 than one animal per annum, and half of these 

 on the average will be bulls. The bulls being 

 thus one-half and their productive capacity 

 being, let us say, fifty fold that of the cows, 

 their demand for the purposes of breeding 



