362 THE OX. 



XVII. THE HEREFORDSHIRE BREED. 



Extending along the base of the mountains of Wales is a 

 tract of fertile country, calculated to increase the size, and 

 so to modify the characters, of the cattle which it maintains. 

 This effect is seen in the fine race produced in the Vale of 

 Glamorgan, in the mixed races which occupy the lower parts 

 of Montgomeryshire, and yet more in those of the richly cul- 

 tivated county of Hereford. If we suppose that at any time 

 a common race of cattle occupied the higher country and the 

 lower, we must believe that its characters would gradually 

 diverge as the animals became naturalized in mountains of 

 natural herbage, or became the inhabitants of a cultivated 

 country capable of yielding artificial food. Herefordshire 

 was of old a part of the country of the Cambro-Britons, but 

 at a very early period fell under the dominion of the Anglo- 

 Saxons. Yet although it has thus for a vast period been 

 connected with Wales only by contiguity of situation, its 

 cattle retain the traces of a common ancestry. They have 

 that orange-yellow colour of the skin which distinguishes the 

 Pembrokes and the Devon s, and that medium length of horns 

 which separates these breeds and their varieties from the 

 race termed Long-horned. It cannot be supposed that they 

 have been kept free from intermixture with the Long-horned 

 and other varieties of the lower country, but they may be re- 

 ferred to that group of breeds which comprehends the Pem- 

 broke, the Devon, the Sussex, and the Glamorgan, and which 

 some writers have proposed to term Middle-horned, a desig- 

 nation which distinguishes them from the Long-horned on the 

 one hand, and the Short-horned on the other, but which does 

 not sufficiently separate them from other very different va- 

 rieties, as those which occupied many of the former forests 

 of the country, and even from the older Yorkshire Short- 

 horns. Of the changes which the Herefords have, until a 

 period comparatively recent, undergone, from mixture or 



