Training and Breeding. Is3 



the fat, beyond what may be required for culinary or 

 merely condimental uses, that is produced in raising cat- 

 tle, represents a waste of the grasses, hay, or other cattle 

 feed, that might be more readily and profitably convert- 

 ed into muscle, or other real growth, than into fat, which 

 is not growth, nor a product of growth, but simply accum- 

 ulated "structureless matter." The animal structures that 

 are nutritive, are those parts that are organized, and neces- 

 sary to life and motion, such as the muscles, nerve-sub- 

 stances, and allied parts. 



Muscle naturally comprises over half the weight of cat- 

 tle, and it constitutes the most nutritive and valuable part 

 of beef, namely, the red flesh, or juicy portion of the meat. 

 Hence cattle and their meat are nutritively valuable, ac- 

 cording to the extent of their muscular proportion, or the 

 quantity of their nutritive or organized flesh parts. 



It is established that exercise is necessary to develop 

 muscle, because all the different degrees of muscular de- 

 velopment in inan and animals are the result of, and cor- 

 respond to, the degrees of exercise which habitually have 

 developed such quantities or proportions of muscles togeth- 

 er with other organized structures. Hence any degree of 

 muscularity in the nutritive value it affords, cannot be in- 

 creased, nor even maintained, without a similar degree of 

 regular exercise to that which originally developed such 

 extent of muscle. 



For illustration, if twenty steers be turned into a forty- 

 acre lot of stout, thick grass, they quickly fill themselves, 

 and lie down to ruminate or repose. With so little* exer- 

 cise, the stock have their arteries engorged rapidly with 

 thick blood, that increases fat — not muscle — rapidly, be- 



* If deficient exercise be accompanied by Iree indulgence of appetite, * * * 

 naturally there is an abnormal accumulation of fat, amounting to actual dis-^ 

 ease, and a disturbance of tbe nutritive forces that undermines the healthy 

 structure of tbe tissues. Nor is this muscular deterioration limited to parts 

 that are nijusLd; tliu involuntary mechanism also becomes implicated. —Hitx* 

 ley and Youmans' Physi., p. 427. 



