24 
’Robert Bakewell. 
kept open house. But few rains were sold compared with the 
numbers let. The principal ram-breeders saved 20, 30, or 40 
ram lambs, which were “ chosen more by blood than by form,’ 1 
weaned in July or August, and then indulged in keep to the 
utmost and “ pushed forward ” for show. Each of the principal 
breeders, by common consent, showed forty rams, one-shear to 
five-shear, comparatively few being serviceable after that age, 
although some retained their vigour to the sixth or seventh 
year. Even at that age, Marshall remarks, decay is not 
natural , but is brought on by unnatural fatness. The ewes are 
prolific to a greater age. The females, however, of this breed 
enter the stage of decay sooner than those of other breeds, 
because they enter the stage of fatness sooner. In the choice of 
rams, some farmers observed a distinction between sheep suit- 
able for ram-breeding and those for wether-breeding, the former 
“ cleaner and finer,” the latter having more strength. Some 
breeders refused to recognise this difference, and Marshall held 
that if there was no danger of breeding too fine they were 
right. From this remark it would appear that they took the 
more refined rams as sheep of the higher and truer improved 
type. Their wether-breeding could be adjusted, if more strength 
were required, by the choice of coarser ewes for that particular 
purpose. But Bakewell, as we have seen, left two types of sheep, 
the finer, and the stronger, the latter established late in his life. 
Bakewell’s work of improvement in cattle, as most probably 
also in sheep, was expended upon what we may truly 
enough call the breed of his own district. As in his sheep- 
breeding, whatever crosses he may have taken, he certainly took 
the Longwools, already introduced, and perhaps we may say 
established, with local variations, as the prevailing race of sheep 
in his own and neighbouring counties, so in his cattle-breeding, 
however far he went to bring together different branches of the 
breed, he took the Longhorn, the prevailing breed of the Mid- 
lands, when he began his work of improvement. 
The material he had to work upon, however, was already 
greatly improved from the fiat-sided, coarse-shouldered, old 
Longhorn of Ireland and the western side of England, a slow 
grower, slow mover, light in the hind quarters and lean-fleshed, 
a fair but not extraordinary milker. That breed, in some parts 
of the North of England, particularly in North Lancashire, the 
adjoining part of Westmoreland, and the Craven district of 
Yorkshire, had risen to a considerable degree of excellence, both 
as a beef breed (time allowed) and for dairy purposes ; whilst 
successively in Derbyshire Sir Thomas Gresley, of Drakelow, and 
