Twenty Years' Changes in our Foreign Meat Supplies. 467 
sarily uncertain, I ara anxious to be allowed to make it clear 
what is dealt with under the name of ' meat.' By this in the 
sense here used, I understand simply beef, mutton and pig-meat, 
including in the latter term, for the sake of brevity, the various 
forms of bacon, hams and pork, in which we consume the produce 
of our own or foreign swine. I am not of course unaware of 
the supplementary animal food which enters into our yearly 
consumption — the poultry, rabbits, game and eggs ; perhaps also 
I ought to add all the fish which forms always a material part 
of the food of the people. Reliable data for such an extension 
of our enquiry do not exist, for we do not know, and have 
scarcely any means of estimating, our domestic production in 
Great Britain. In the notes, therefore, which 1 now offer, I 
confine myself to the more limited items of our meat supply, 
and mainly on this occasion to the dimensions and the sources, 
and the past fluctuations of that sea-borne portion of our yearly 
provision which has filled up the gap left by the apparent failure 
of our native production to respond to the native demand. 
It will be convenient perhaps to carry the enquiry a little 
further back than was done in 1872, and, slightly overlapping Sir 
Henry Thompson's figures, to glance at the state of matters over 
the whole period embraced by our existing system of agricul- 
tural statistics from 1867 to 1887 — a period long enough to allow 
of many characteristic changes in the sources of our supplies. 
Twenty years ago this country had just emerged from the 
danger and the losses of the invasion of the fatal Rinderpest. 
Taught by experience, we had begun to find it wise rather to 
■ risk a possible check to the importation of living animals by 
sanitary regulations, than to court the insidious entrance of 
contagious diseases along with cattle from suspected quarters. 
The arrivals on our shores of cattle, sheep, and pigs, in 1867 
and 1868, fell far short of some earlier records, and the dead- 
meat trade of the period at which I begin this survey was also 
at a lower level than we shall again find it in subsequent years. 
It has been, I find, a very common practice simply to compare 
the number of head of stock imported at various dates. This 
information has, doubtless, its own interest, and I may have 
to use it in certain cases ; but it may lead us wrong if we 
regard as equal units in our calculations imports so widely 
diverse as a Dutch calf and a fat American ox. I propose, 
therefore, wherever practicable, to translate the simple numbers 
into the equivalent weights of food represented, thus more 
readily obtaining a combined view of the live and dead meat 
competition at given dates. The remarkable changes, too, in 
the countries whence our imported live-stock come will thus be 
made more clearly visible, by taking into account the varying 
VOL. XXIII. — S. S. 2 I 
