TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 845 



animals disembarked on our shores on the average of recent years do not furnish 

 as much as one-third of the foreign meat supply. AVhile the advance in live 

 importations is 270 per cent, that in dead meat is 450 per cent. 



If I had endeavoured to arrive at the total production of meat in the United 

 Kingdom in an opposite manner to that adopted, by assuming that the con- 

 sumption varied only with the population, and by a uniform rate per head, and 

 assuming as a standard the 100 lb. limit of consumption current in 1868, it would 

 have seemed that the home produce had fallen off not only relatively but absolutely. 

 But such a mode would have made it appear that equal stocks of animals on our 

 farms were not producing anything like the same amount of meat as before. No 

 one conversant with the advance of agricultural practice, the growing weights of 

 our fat stock, and their earlier maturity, will readily accept such a conclusion 

 Indeed, but for the repeated invasions of disease, and especially the spread of 

 foot-and-mouth disease, with its serious and lasting effects on the breeding powers, 

 a marked increase in annual outturn might have been looked for. 



There is, however, another consideration which should not be overlooked. 

 What I have called our home production is not, strictly speaking, sustained solely 

 by British acres. The soils of other lands are made tributary to our stock pro- 

 duction. There is now a very large importation and use of foreign feeding stuffs 

 linseed, cotton seed, and other cakes, maize, and so forth, which plays a considerable 

 part in the fattening of native stock. Without these external helps we should not 

 turn out the 1,300,000 tons yearly on which I have reckoned. Sir John Bennet 

 Lawes, than whom no man is more fitted to pronounce an authoritative opinion, sets 

 down from 40,000 to 50,000 tons of meat yearly as representing the annual result, 

 of imported feeding stuffs. Although not a very large share of the whole it would 

 probably place the outturn of 1883 behind that of 1868, and the cost and sources 

 of such additional food must necessarily be a consideration not to be left out of 

 sight by those who are recommending the English farmer to undertake to fatten 

 a vastly increased supply of lean store stock from the prairies of the far West. 

 Nor is the addition to the productive capacity of our soil due to the use of foreign 

 manures an unimportant consideration in the production of meat. Upwards ot 

 2,000,000/. are being now annually spent on guano and imported manures, and 

 between 8,000,000/. and 9,000,000/. are yearly paid for such feeding stuffs as I 

 have named, independent of the purchase of maize and other foreign grains for 

 feeding purposes. It is hardly possible therefore to refuse to recognise in these 

 considerations conditions which may seriously check the profitable fattening of an 

 unlimited supply of butcher meat. 



Especial interest has attached of late to the sources of our foreign supplies so 

 far as these are furnished in the shape of living animals. The risk of importing 

 disease and the necessity for the most stringent precautions have, doubtless, in some 

 degree restricted a still larger importation of foreign live stock, and possibly these 

 very proper restrictions have given a fillip to what I must regard as the superior 

 form of that dead meat trade which, as has been shown, has most remarkably 

 increased of late. Still, however, as long as it remains profitable, we are likely 

 to have live animals sent across the ocean, and the recent changes in the quarters 

 whence we derive our main supplies are sufficiently striking to attract attention. 

 In presenting these also in a graphic form a lesson may be taught to the exporters 

 of cattle from the side of the Atlantic where this paper is read as to the pre- 

 eminent necessity of the most complete sanitary system of protecting their own 

 stocks if they mean to dispose of their surplus in Great Britain, and if their trade 

 is to be a growing one. 



In the diagram subjoined I divide the imports of live cattle during the past decade 

 into three classes, represented by three parallel columns in each annual division : 

 (1) those coming from the American Continent, whether Canada or the United 

 States ; (2) those from the three Scandinavian countries, viz., Denmark, Sweden 

 and Norway ; and (3) the imports from all other European countries. 



The transatlantic trade in cattle only becomes appreciable in 1876. But since 

 1877 the receipts of live cattle from the United States have risen, though with 

 some remarkable fluctuations, from 11,500 to 154,600, and the Canadian quota 



