206 WILD WHITE CATTLE OF GREAT BRITAIN. 



short, sweet, and tender, and yet had sufficient firmness. 

 The finest Scottish, Welsh, or Devon was inferior to it in 

 flavour; and the fat, of which there was abundance, was 

 delicious, and in elasticity on a par with that of the 

 best venison. The " quality " was extraordinary, and 

 was accompanied by what breeders and graziers always 

 regard as a test of " quality " — great lightness of offal. 

 This piece of beef must have lost weight, for it had a 

 long journey from Northumberland to London, and 

 then down to Hellidon. When it came into my house, 

 I saw it carefully weighed, and the weight was forty 

 pounds to an ounce; while the bone it contained (which 

 I have preserved), when divested of the marrow, 

 weighed one pound, or sixteen ounces, only : a most rare 

 instance, I believe — two and a half per cent, of bone. 

 Other parts would, of course, have had a much higher 

 percentage of bone ; yet in these, too, the percentage 

 must have been, relatively to most other cattle, very 

 small. It was this "uncommon fineness and delicacy 

 of its bones " which struck Eiitimeyer so much when he 

 examined anatomically the Chillingham Bos; and it 

 was this rare quality which rendered this same herd, 

 and others similarly descended, fitted to become — what 

 I fully believe they were — the great improvers, when the 

 coarse, big-boned cattle of former days required to have 

 their superabundant offal sensibly reduced. 



The numbers of the herd appear to vary a good deal 

 at no lonff intervals. We have seen before that in 

 all probability in the year 1692, according to the 

 steward's account, it consisted of only fourteen breeding 

 animals, bulls and cows, and calves of both sexes, and 

 twelve steers — in all twenty-eight. Mr. Hindmarsh 

 states that in 1838 there were "about eighty in the 



