THE ESCUTCHEON 37 



be noted if we could look down upon the back of the cow. The 

 thin edge of the wedge would be forward, the body of the cow 

 becoming wider towards her rear until the region of the paunch 

 has been reached, where the greatest dimensions will be shown. 

 The third wedge is seen by looking at the cow from the front. 

 The sharp edge of the wedge will be her shoulders, the wedge 

 thickening as it goes downward until a point at the floor of the 

 chest has been reached. Cows built thus, however, usually 

 spread their front feet slightly, thus continuing the wedge to 

 the ground. May Eilma, Fig. 2, illustrates the point of this 

 paragraph. 



The escutcheon is that area of the cow situated immediately 

 above the rear portion of the udder and extending upward and 

 laterally onto the thighs, on which area the hair naturally turns 

 upward rather than downward. Particular attention was first 

 drawn to this mark by Francis Guenon, in France, prior to 

 1837. Mr. Guenon classified the various kinds of escutcheons 

 into eight classes and eight orders, making sixty-four different 

 combinations, to each one of which he affixed a figure which he 

 calculated would be the amount of milk which that cow would 

 yield under good treatment in a year. His statements were so 

 positive and his description so exact that universal credence was 

 given to the theory. He was honored and pensioned by the 

 French Government. The breed associations almost universally 

 adopted the escutcheon as a point of excellence and it has been 

 retained on most score cards until the present. With no exact 

 comparisons, however, the universal belief in the value of the 

 escutcheon has died out until few can be found now to defend 

 its presence on the score card of the modern breeds. More exact 

 evidence of the fact that there is little or no merit in the 

 escutcheon was furnished by Charles Moran, senior student at 

 the University of Vermont, in 1910. His study, covering a 

 year of record of one hundred cows in three herds, showed no 

 consistent agreement between the quantity or the quality of 

 milk which the cow was supposed to give according to the Guenon 

 theory and the amount she did yield as measured by daily 

 weighings and the Babcock test. 



