RETROSPECTIVE REFLECTIONS. 



possess, whether it is to be but temporary or lasting, how far 

 favourable to the advancement of a higher civilisation? These are 

 questions upon the fact, or the professed solution of the fact, and 

 belong to the province of opinion; but to a fact do they relate, on 

 an admitted fact do they turn, which must be ascertained as other 

 facts, be-fore anyone desirous of entering upon these industries should 

 risk his capital. 



To those already engaged in these industries, the question should 

 not require very much theoretical study. They should have long 

 since passed beyond the reasoning of individual minds, and their 

 opinion should have long since become public property. Instead, 

 however, of the public getting any benefit from the opinions of our 

 long-established dairymen and dairy cattle breeders, the people of 

 this State will find on reflection that, with but very few exceptions, 

 these men of long experience are invariably silent as the graves of 

 the ancient Danes in Ireland, until they have first grasped the 

 opinions of the other fellow. Even then they only enter upon a 

 discussion of enquiry so as to ascertain, if possible, where the other 

 fellow got his information. 



One theory has met with wide acceptance during the past twenty- 

 five years, namely, that cattle breeding does not fall within the 

 province of history, and that it is in consequence a science to each 

 breeder, what each breeder thinks it to be. and nothing else; that, 

 in fact, the word breeder is a mere name for a man 

 who has accidentally become possessed of a few head of 

 good cattle, not because there cannot be assigned to all 

 breeders one and the same system as the common founda- 

 tion of all theories ; but because certain points of agree- 

 ment may be found here and there of some sort or other, by which 

 each in its turn is connected with one or other of the rest. Or, 

 again, it may be either implied or maintained that all existing 

 theories of cattle breeding are wrong. Therefore, to solve this 

 problem, writers must have recourse to history in order to study 

 the system practised by the cattle breeders of ancient and modern 

 times. 



Furthermore, since systems, practical or theoretical, of breeding 

 dairy cattle, have one and the same great comprehensive subject- 

 matter, they necessarily interfere with one another as rivals when 

 placed side by side in cold type, both in points of agreement and 

 difference. Thus dairy cattle breeding since its rise in Illawarra 

 upwards of eighty years since, has been in these circumstances o-f 

 competition, a conclusion sufficiently evident from the foregoing 

 chapter. It has been from the first surrounded by all sorts of 

 conditions, the result of diverse opinions, which contemplated the 

 same problems, by sometimes advocating the same facts, which por- 

 trayed the same animals as being of different breeds, whilst they 

 wore in no slight degree the same external wedge-shaped appear- 

 ance, with various-colored hair. 



Events move in cycles; all things come round; and weakness is 

 but the resulting product of power. Hence a high-class dairy cow 

 is usually the product of a purebred and a cross-bred sire and dam. 

 There is no limit to such development, unless it be that over-pro- 

 duction, like over-wisdom, is folly, a paradox which seems to imply 

 that too much of what is good is evil. Had each breeder the 

 power, while keeping his own fancy breed true to its own identity, 

 instead of absorbing his opponent's breed, as Aaron's rod devoured 

 the rods of the sorcerers of Egypt, there probably never would 

 have been such bitterness displayed between the breeders and 

 owners of the present-day Tllawarra breed of cattle, and the breeders 

 and owners of those animals carrying the MS brand. Tt is, there- 



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