10 
Robert Bakewell. 
experiment to prove their rate of increase in proportion to food 
consumed ; and after their death, to examination of the quality 
of their flesh and proportion of fleslx to offal. But that 
was not all. Skeletons and pickled joints of specimens of the 
best of the Dishley sheep and cattle formed a little museum at 
The Grange, for the comparison of one generation with another, 
ancestors with their descendants. The degree of fineness 
of bone, the size and shape of the frame, the thickness of the 
layers of muscle, and the depth of outside fat and quantity 
of inside fat were thus brought under notice, and any change 
for the better or worse was recognised in time to serve as a guide 
to the breeder, to whom the animals were known, alive or dead, 
inside' and outside. Mr. Bakewell’s post-mortem examinations 
of his cattle and sheep must have helped very much to educate 
the senses of sight and touch for use in judging the living 
animals, whilst enabling him the more accurately to estimate 
the intrinsic value of the latter for breeding purposes by their 
relationships to the different specimens seen in the shambles, or 
represented by relics in the private museum of The Grange. 
The question of the principles recognised by Bakewell has been 
much discussed, that of his practice somewhat warmly disputed. 
In the volume entitled Necrology (1805), already mentioned, his 
principles are laid down dogmatically as (1) “ Like will produce 
like,” and (2) “ Animal manure the main science of husbandry,” 
which the author says are allowed to be just ; but Bakewell’s 
application of them, he adds, was far from incontrovertible. 
Now we know that the first is no more a Bakewellian than it is 
a Shakespearian principle, for we have evidence that in many 
familiar passages Shakespeare recognised it two hundred years 
before Bakewell’s day ; and if an earlier reference still be required, 
the first chapter of the Book of Genesis may suffice. The law of 
reproduction after kind has been known to man certainly from the 
dawn of his own history. Bakewell, like other great breeders, 
acted upon his own observation of the workings of that law among 
domesticated animals, more subject to variation than animals in 
their free state of nature. He maintained that by the exercise 
of intelligent care in selecting it is quite possible “to get beasts 
to weigh where you want them to weigh,” in the roasting instead 
of the boiling pieces ; that the shape should give “ the greatest 
value in the smallest compass”; that the shape which does that 
is correlated with a hardy constitution and great readiness to 
fatten ; that the shape of a barrel, swelling in the middle and 
gently lessening towards the ends, is the true model ; and that 
“ the smaller the bone the truer the shape,” and the better, 
consequently, the return for food consumed. The breeder, he 
