6 
Robert BaTcewell. 
was his purpose appears to be indicated by the fact that after 
looking around him in various districts he selected a few choice 
specimens of different breeds, purchased and took them to 
Dishley. “ This selection,” an early writer states, “ gave the 
original stock from which his own proceeded ” ; but we are not 
here informed whether his own proceeded from a mixture of 
breeds, or from a final selection of the best of those he had 
tested upon his own farm. 
Mr. Bakewell saw much of the West of England. There 
he could see, carried into fairly extensive practice, the system of 
irrigation which his father had adopted, and which he himself 
was destined to extend. There, too, he found a breed of cattle — 
the Devon— which he pronounced incapable of improvement by 
a cross of any other breed. If we take this declaration in 
connexion with his own avowed principle of refining and 
reducing the bone as a means of getting a greater proportion of 
flesh to food consumed, and a greater tendency to fatten, may 
we not reasonably suggest the probability that the Devon 
served as his model for the improvement of the larger breed 
which he adopted as a breed already established in the Midlands, 
and perhaps as a breed capable of doing better in Leicestershire 
than any other breed he had tried ? The same model would 
also serve his design of founding an improved breed of sheep, 
for the same principle of lessening the bone to increase the 
fattening propensity was applied by him to all classes of 
butchers’ beasts. We shall see this as we come to the records 
of his practice and experiments. 
Before, however, we consider the work for which he is recog- 
nised as a man of distinguished power, his improvement of sheep 
and cattle, we shall find a glance at his general husbandry useful 
in assisting us the better to gauge the man. His great pre- 
vailing idea, we should say, and that which lay at the very root 
and sources of his strength, was economy. If the Devon really 
was his model — and he assuredly admired it — he had in it 
economy both in structure and in the proportion of the cost to 
the quantity and quality of human food produced ; or, say, in 
the return per acre. He maintained that he had secured such 
economy in the breeds established by himself as improvements 
upon all other breeds. The English farms he most admired 
were those of Norfolk, where he found “ cheap, expeditious, and 
effective modes of husbandry ” ; the foreign farms — for he occa- 
sionally went abroad to enlarge his knowledge — those of Holland 
and Flanders, where he found that orderly neatness which is 
true economy, inasmuch as slovenly farming is wasteful. Upon 
the principles of management at these British and Continental 
