468 Twenty Years'' Changes in our Foreign Meat Supplies. 
weights of their produce. The official publication by the 
Agricultural Department in their 1883 Report, of the average 
weights of the animals arriving from different countries, enables 
me to make a closer estimate than if I were to assume, as in 
Sir Henry Thompson's paper, a mean uniform weight for all 
foreign cattle, sheep, or pigs, regardless of the country of origin. 
This explanation I must offer here, as it will account for some 
slight difference in the weight of imports in the years enu-' 
merated in both papers. 
There is one other proviso I would make before dealing with 
the figures. Unquestionably certain of our live imports from 
what are technically known as clean countries, from Canada 
and from Denmark for instance, are not immediately on their 
arrival available as meat as here reckoned. So far as any foreign 
store cattle are retained for fattening, they will come into the 
totals of our domestic census in each month of June, and will 
undoubtedly cause a percentage of error and of double reckon- 
ing. The totals are not in any case considerable. The same 
error pervades all the earlier estimates, as well as that now 
offered, and in a comparative survey its importance is of less 
moment than at first appears. I am unaware of any sufficient 
data to enable me to eliminate the proportion of animals thus 
duplicated, or to discover the proper share of the resultant food 
supply which it might be said should be credited on" the one 
hand to the foreign rearers of the lean stock, and on the other to 
the British finishers of the imported raw material. The task 
would perhaps, if attempted, suggest a far more serious, but 
equally impracticable, rectification on the other side of the 
account in respect of the imported feeding-stuffs through whose 
agency alone a considerable addition is undoubtedly m.ade to 
the yearly out-turn of meat from the stock of the United 
Kingdom. 
The foreign meat consumed in this country reaches us in two 
distinct forms, live animals and dead meat, but the ratio' between 
the two has materially altered in the last twenty years. That 
is perhaps one of the first changes which will strike the investi- 
gator, and it will readily appear if the total arrivals for each 
year, or — as is always very much safer from a statistical point 
of view — for each group of consecutive years, be contrasted. 
Beginning with the years 1867-8-9, and proceeding to the 
latest completed accounts, the subjoined figures show the mean 
annual receipts of foreign meat in tons in each period. These it 
is well to compare with the mean population resident in the 
United Kingdom in each triennium, and this will form the first 
of the tables which I shall have to inflict on the readers of these 
pages : — 
