864 Prices of Store Cattle per Live Stone, and Official Quotations. 
individuals, mostly by one person. All the trouble, labour, and ex- 
pense of these statistics have been furnished by private enterprise. 
The knowledge thus obtained, only published as it is now, long 
after the store cattle trade is over, can be of no service to those who 
were engaged in it during the past twelve months. Could the in- 
formation have been officially made public from time to time as the 
sales came off, how interesting and instructive it would have been to 
buyers or sellers of stores at the time, and how much such informa- 
tion would facilitate transactions between buyers and sellers at a 
distance from each other, or the execution of orders on commission ! 
It is not too much for agriculturists to ask of the Board of 
Trade, or the Board of Agriculture, to procure such returns and publish 
them weekly for public use. They may be incomplete, possibly 
meagre, at the outset, but it is now well known that there are in Eng- 
land, Ireland, and specially in Scotland, auctioneers, cattle-dealers, 
breeders, and graziers who could, and many who would, willingly give 
the information, if furnished with forms for its transmission to the 
Department of State charged with the preparation and publica- 
tion of these statistics. For the purposes of farming business, such 
returns would undoubtedly prove of greater value to agriculturists 
than the present annual agricultural statistics. The one would be 
a guide to the buyer and seller, while the other — which is not — is of 
service only to the statistician. 
The Board of Agriculture has invited the co-operation of the 
Royal Agricultural Society of England in the suppression of conta- 
gious disease in animals, and there can be no question but that the 
points of contact between the Department of State and the Society 
will be many, though the functions of the two institutions are and 
must be different. 
Now, this Society publishes periodically, in its Journal, statistics 
affecting British agricultural interests. Among them is a table with 
the price of wheat for the year, depressing enough just now, but 
which will be referred to with interest in future years. Another 
table gives the average prices of British corn from the London 
Gazette, while the average price of wool per lb. is given in another 
table under four different qualities. 
If a student or statistician in years to come, or indeed at the 
present time, desired to know the current value of store cajbtle, lie 
would find this Journal silent as regards official information, for tho 
best of reasons — that the State has not troubled itself to procure and 
furnish such information. 
Perhaps without public weighing-machines it was not possible to 
do so. We know all about it on the other side of the Atlantic, and 
next to nothing in the case of cattle reared and fed in our own country. 
There has been hardly any general importunity on the subjec t, and 
it requires pressure to move great departments of State. As the 
present want of knowledge which is really obtainable is discredit- 
able to the country at large, and to agriculturists in particular, the 
attempt to remove it would surely be one in which the Royal Agri- 
cultural Society of England might take hearty and zealous action. 
Albert Pell. 
