Ahmiton in Cattle. 
731 
Epizootic abortion has steadily increased among our culti- 
vated breeds of cattle. Cows of the highest type of artificial 
excellence are most likely to suffer, for two reasons : — 
(n) Want of constitutional tone and power to resist disease 
due to precocity of development. 
(b) The use for breeding of pedigree cows, which repeatedly 
fail to hold to their service. 
On the first point, the writer may quote from an essay which 
he wrote for the Bath and West of England Society's Journal 
in 1864 I :— 
Were aTiimals bred and treated with more regard to a healthy condition 
of the various organs, their liability to disease would be materially dimi- 
nished and their power to resist it augmented, and the extraordinary losses 
■which are sustained every year in our country would no longer be a reflec- 
tion upon our agriculture. The readiness with which animals yield to the 
influence of epizootic maladies has long been a subject of remark, and we 
do not underrate the virulence of the disease nor the importance of any 
means which shall tend to prevent its importation when we insist that a 
great part of the mortality is due to the predisposition of the animal's 
system permanently established by our methods of breeding and manage- 
ment. . . . 
We are ready to admit that remarkable results have followed the efforts 
to improve the breeds of stock, results not satisfactory in the main, but not 
the less decided. "We accept the proofs of what can be achieved by syste- 
matic attention to a definite object ; but we do not the less contend that the 
system has been carried too far. The principle has been all along that of the 
railroad : the struggle to drive onward rapidly at all risks, even without 
considering them. The cry has been for the animal that will be the first 
ready for the carriage, the saddle, the dairy, or the butcher, and so far 
the demand has been answered : at what cost we have endeavoured to show. 
Whatever respect may be accorded to our suggestions, we may at least ask 
that the " forcing system shall no longer exist under a false designation, 
tLat men shall not in future speak of the artificial induction of disease, of 
premature development, and of systematic degeneration under the imposing 
terms Cultivatiox and Ijipeovejtext. 
Those words were written some twenty-seven years ago, and 
they are repeated now by the writer with as firm a belief in their 
truth as when he penned them in the first instance. Again, the 
following passage is quoted from a small work which was written 
in 1885, entitled Animal Life on the Farm,'^ in which, in a very 
concise manner, the history of breeding and rearing of stock of 
the highest type, under our present system of cultivation, is 
given : — 
Our " biid's-eye " view of animal life under two veiy different sets of con- 
PrecocUy of I)evehj,ment considered in lidation to the Besiilts of the 
Present System of Breeding and Feeding. B. & W. Journal. Vol. XII. 1864, 
pp. 56-58. 
* Morton's Handbook of the Farm Series, "Animal Life on the Farm." 
pp . 100, 101, and 102. 
