03 The Earhj Fattening of Cattle and Sheep. 
Ample evidence exists that it may be well fed and made ripe 
and firm by proper management. The same remark, in fact, 
applies to all sorts of meat, whatever the breed and age may be. 
A rasher of maize-fed bacon, swimming in oily fat, will hardly 
please refined tastes. It is within the power of the scientific 
feeder to balance his rations with a view to producing milk, 
ilesh, fat, or lean. And he may produce firm or oily fat, hard 
or tender flesh. Barley or maize meal, malt or rice meal, for 
example, are all too rich in carbonaceous constituents and too 
poor in albuminoids, and they should, therefore, be mixed with 
such foods as linseed cake, decorticated cotton cake, or bean 
meal, which are all rich in nitrogenous ingredients. 
The German experiments have thrown some light on the 
chemistry of stock-feeding, but I must not venture beyond my 
limits as a practical writer. I may, however, refer my readers 
to the elaborate experiments on the feeding of animals at 
Rothamsted, and to the paper by Sir John B. Lawes and 
Dr. Gilbert " On the Composition of Oxen, Sheep, and Pigs " 
(Journal, Vol. XXL, 1st Series, 18G1). 
The stock-feeder will do well to acquaint himself with the 
science of his subject, and to act in a cautious and tentative 
manner as an experimenter, trusting more to the direct evidence 
of his own trials, and of the successful stock-feeding of other 
people, than to the composition of the carcasses of animals, or 
the analyses of the substances on which they feed. 
I ought, perhaps, to mention here that -a paper was written 
by Dr. Sprague, at the request of the United States Depart- 
ment of Agriculture, in which the power that breeders and 
feeders may exert in developing particular qualities in meat 
is handled in a very interesting manner, from a physiological 
standpoint. Writing of marbled beef — that is, beef having 
the fat distributed among the fibres of the muscles instead of 
being laid on irregularly in lumps — he poiuts out the improve- 
ment which has been effected in the flesh of all our domesticated 
meat-producing animals, and their increased capacity for laying 
on flesh ; and, after showing that flesh and frame are alike 
pliable in the breeder's hands, he declares that they have not 
sufficiently attended to the quality of meat, to the structure of 
fibre and muscle, and to the marbling of the flesh. Meat at the 
best contains a large proportion of fat so largely interspersed 
with the lean that those who object to fat cannot help swallow- 
ing a large part of it with the lean, though they may not know 
it. The Rothamsted experiments have shown that " of dry fat, 
the entire body of a fat calf contains 1 i£ per cent.;" that of 
a fat ox twice as much, or 30 per cent. The same rule holds 
