THE EVOLUTION OF THE DAIRY COW 



25 



was common and that the fat of milk was used for the purpose of 

 anointing the body at an earlier period than it was used as a 

 food, and that its place as a food is probably not much more than 

 3000 years old. 



Our word " dairy " seems to have come to us through the 

 old and middle English, " deieris," from " dey," meaning a 

 maid-servant, especially one employed about the farm or live- 

 stock. We find the same in Norwegian " deia " as in " bu-deia," 

 a maid-servant in charge of livestock. 



During what is known as the " Middle Ages " and later, the 



Fig. 8. — Sons of cows are the motors, the grass-eneires in pioneer life. They will 

 work where horses cannot go, live on coarse foods and become marketable beef when too 

 old to labor. (Photo by G. G. Wiltse, Pine River, Minn.) 



dairy cow as an instrument in human food production was 

 developed most strongly in Holland and Switzerland. 



The evolution of the dairy cow from some mediocre, early 

 type animal (Fig. 7), to the present deep-bodied, capacious, 

 wonderful machine, has been a more or less gradual process, but 

 much more rapid during the past 200 years than during any 

 previous time. It cannot be thought that any man schemed to 

 produce an economical dairy worker and set about to develop that 

 form now known as the dairy type, but rather that as individual 

 cows varied slightly it was observed that some yielded more milk 



