212 WILD WHITE CATTLE OF GREAT BRITAIN. 



the same herd more than three years, and no tup more 

 than two ; because (say they) if used longer, the breed 

 will be too near akin, and the produce will be tender, 

 diminutive, and liable to disorders." 



Such were the ideas which prevailed universally 

 before the time of Bakewell ; and it is scarcely to be 

 supposed that noblemen and gentlemen, any more than 

 farmers and breeders, would disbelieve opinions which 

 were then universally accepted as true. That they did 

 not is shown by the circumstance that they constantly 

 infused new blood into their herds of deer; and this 

 was much less necessary, inasmuch as they were far more 

 numerous. Take, for instance, Chillingham, with its 

 average of, perhaps, 50 head of wild cattle and 400 of 

 fallow deer, during the last hundred years. It seems 

 obvious that the habit of breeding from close rela- 

 tionships and affinities would be eight times as great 

 in the cattle as in the deer, and that if the cattle 

 only required a cross at the end of a hundred years, 

 the deer would not require one, supposing the same 

 rule to hold good with both, till the end of eight 

 hundred years. It is certainly not probable that men 

 who thought their deer required a change of blood 

 would think otherwise — when that, too, was the received 

 opinion — with regard to their cattle, which were so 

 much more closely inter-bred. There seems no reason to 

 suppose that the owners of the wild herds would act 

 differently from what, in their day, every one else 

 did. 



They had, moreover, every facility for taking an occa- 

 sional cross. Three hundred years since, and still more 

 if we go farther back, the whole of the North was studded 

 with herds of these wild cattle. Numbers of them were 



