THE UNITED KINGDOM. 183 



the alphabet of our English commodities, though exceeding in W. for 

 wood, wheat, wool, and water," and u that its wheat was worthy to jostle 

 in pureness with that of Heston, in Middlesex, which furnished man- 

 chets for the kings of England, and its Wye salmon were in season all 

 the year long." And before his day u painful Master Camden" described 

 the county as "not willingly content to be accounted secondshire for 

 matters of fruitfulness." Yet both writers are silent as to cattle, and 

 Drayton sang of " fair Suffolk's maids and milk," of the hogs of Hamp- 

 shire, the calves of Essex, and how 



Rich Buckingham doth bear 

 The name of "Bread and Beef;" 



yet he says nothing of these attributes of Herefordshire. 



Many writers were of opinion that the Herefords were descended from 

 cattle from Devon and Normandy, which were of a deep reddish brown 

 color, and that the white faces were an accident from a singular sport 

 of the breeding of a white-faced bull by a noted breeder of the last cen- 

 tury, Mr. Tully, of Huntington, near Hereford. The story I have heard 

 related as follows : That the cow-man came to him, on his coming oufc 

 of church one Sunday, and told him that his favorite cow, who was 

 daily expecting to calve, had produced a bull-calf with a white face, and 

 this had never been known before. Eeport says the master ordered it 

 at once to be killed, as he dared not let it be known that he had such a 

 stain of blood in his well-known herd ; but the man begged him to go 

 and see it, as it was the finest calf he had ever seen. Mr. Tully, when 

 he had seen it, agreed with his man that it was a wonder, and that he 

 would, out of curiosity, rear it. He did so, and he proved to be a very 

 remarkably fine animal, and he used him on all his best cows, and his 

 progeny became celebrated for their white faces. Many old chroniclers 

 say that the county was noted for its breed of white cattle on the banks 

 of the Wye as far back as the tenth century, but they had red ears, 

 and it is recorded that Lord Scudamore in, or about the year 1660, in- 

 troduced some red cows, with white faces, from Flanders, and this may 

 have been the reason that the noted Tully bull, after a lapse of more 

 than a hundred years, might have cropped up, as a sport, from the well- 

 known deep red cattle of the country. It must not be considered that 

 the white face is the only type of the purity of this breed, as the mot- 

 tled face is considered by. many breeders as of greater value than the 

 pure white, and I can myself testify that some of the finest cattle I ever 

 grazed, and some of the best I ever saw, have been mottled-faced and 

 light-brindled ; in fact those of the last-named type have shown the 

 greatest aptitude to fatten, on the grass, of any, and many graziers have 

 told me the same. 



Mr. Eyton, of Eyton Hall, Salop, was the founder of the Hereford 

 Herd-Book in 1845, and when he commenced it, he found it necessary 

 to divide the Herefords into four distinct classes, viz, the mottled-faced, 

 the dark-gray, the light-gray or white, and the red with whiteface. Yet, 

 after the lapse of only thirty-eight years, people question the purity of 

 the breed, if they have not the characteristics of the well-known white 

 face and markings. 



Mr. Duckharn says, "the present uniformity of the color is due to the 

 influence of the bull," and this is a remarkable corroboration of my 

 views, expressed in a paper on " Breeding, facts and principles," which 

 I read at a meeting of the Central Farmers' Club, some few years since, 



