Rise and Progress of Hereford Cattle. 
277 
not notable for the number of its springes. The largest portion 
of the county being clay, though dense Oxford clay, renders lack 
of springs still more felt. Where the level is low the soil is 
ilamp, and large patches of water, like the " Meres " Ramsey 
and Ugg, give a peculiarity to the scenery. Aquatic wildfowl 
frequent them, and, with their peculiar noises, add to the wild- 
ness of the general effect. The county, however, is well drained. 
Elvaston Hall, near Derby, 
February, 18G7. 
XVII. — History of the Rise and Progress of Hereford Cattle. 
By H. H. Dixon. 
Prize Essay. 
"Herefordshire," according to old Fuller, "doth share as 
deep as any county in the alphabet of our English commodities, 
though exceeding in W, for Wood, Wheat, Wool, and Water." 
Its green orchard alleys made it a more favoured spot than 
Pomerania in his eyes. Its Golden Vale produced wool " known 
to the honour thereof as Le'mster ore," and so long and lustrous 
in its fibre that flockmasters were bidden not to envy the Taren- 
tine and the Apulian. Its wheat was " worthy to jostle in 
pureness " with that of Heston in Middlesex, which furnished 
manchets for the kings of England, and its Wye salmon were 
" in season all the year long." 
The quaint old commentator gleaned thus much two hundred 
years ago, in his circular rambles as chaplain to the Royalist 
army, and before his day "painful Master Camden " had described 
the county as " not willingly content to be accounted the second 
shire for matters of fruitfulness." Still both writers are silent 
respecting its cattle. The men were Worthies indeed, working 
to a wondrous old age in the fields, instead of being " the pro- 
perty of the chimney-corners," and ten of them, numbering more 
than a hundred years each, could be found to dance the Moorish 
before King James. Still the Whitefaces had no place in the 
cornucopia of W's, and there are no " vaccine verses " (as Southey 
styled John Hutchinson's) to atone under this head for the barren- 
ness of prose. Drayton, who sang of " Fair Suffolk's JNIaids 
and Milk," the hogs of Hampshire, and the calves of Essex, 
and how 
" Eicb. Buckingham doth bear 
The name of ' Bread and Beef,' " 
spake only in his " blazon of the shires " of Woof and Warp, as 
the attributes of Herefordshire. He does nothing towards con- 
