450 
On WeigJiing Live-Stock. 
feeders and landowners who have fitted up machines in their 
own premises. 
The line that Scotchmen are taking is evidently a practical 
one on the matter, and seems likely to lead up to a customary 
resort to weighing in the cattle trade. 
As a matter of course, in the infancy of any method, how- 
ever good, as much is not got out of it as when practice has 
made it perfect ; and even then artifice and roguery come into 
play and have to be guarded against. Such tricks as this have 
been played in the United States. A waggon of hogs is bought 
by a packer ; the seller takes them on to a public weighing- 
machine, where the clerk gives him a signed ticket of the gross 
weight. Having delivered the hogs at the slaughter-house, he 
returns to the weighing-machine and receives an endorsement 
from the clerk of the weight of the waggon empty ; with this he 
appears at the buyer's office, and — deducting the one from the 
other — is paid the stipulated price per pound for the net weight 
of live hogs. But it so happens that the packer looks in at his 
place of business, and, happening to see the hogs there alive 
together with the weight ticket, is staggered at the figures. A 
reweighing justifies his suspicion of foul dealing. He proceeds 
at once to the clerk who weighed for the seller, with his signed 
ticket of weight in one hand and in the other the record of the 
actual re- weighing of the animals on his own premises, and asks 
for an explanation of the discrepancy. The clerk gives it with 
no difficulty. " Look," says he, " at my ticket of gross weight, 
of waggon with hogs on it. Do you see that little ' on ' in the 
corner ? " " Yes, I do now you point it out," says the buyer. 
" Well, now do you see the little 'off' in the corner of the en- 
dorsement of weight of waggon with the hogs out of it ? " " Cer- 
tainly ; but what of that ? " " Only this," says the clerk : " your 
seller is a stout man and he was ' on ' the waggon when the pigs 
were weighed in it, and ' off ' the waggon when we weighed it 
empty. This accounts for the difference. You have paid for 
his live-weight as well as that of his hogs." 
Tricks, however, can be played on the seller in weighing 
carcasses, but in neither case is this sufficient reason for sur- 
rendering the practice of weighing. 
Although it must be admitted that there is no general dis- 
position to put live animals on the scales, and that the proposal 
does not " go down " rapidly in England, still some progress 
has been made in this matter within the last two years. In 
Volume XVIII., Third Series of the Journal of the Bath and 
West of England Society, there will be found a most useful and 
