209 
Extracts from British and Foreign Journals. 
THE CATTLE TRADE AND MEAT SUPPLY AT HOME AND 
ABROAD. 
The supply of animal food and of fresh meat for our 
population is an important item of production and trade, 
and the traffic necessarily increases with the growth of the 
population, the increasing aggregated masses in large towns, 
the higher wages now earned by the labouring and manufac- 
turing classes, and the more general diffusion of wealth 
among the bulk of the people. 
The efforts of the graziers, important and progressive as they 
have been, are quite inadequate to meet the increasing demand, 
and hence we find that the live-stock imported has almost uni- 
formly increased year by year. In 1 850 we imported 2 1 7,247 
head of all kinds, while on the average of the last three years 
the number imported from the continent has been 326,206 
head annually. But it is chiefly in the cattle (oxen, cows, and 
calves] that the increase is manifest, the number imported 
having risen from 66,462 in 1850, to 97,527 in 1855.* 
Confining our attention at present to cattle, and using the 
imperfect data at command, we may enter into a few calcu- 
lations which will prove interesting at this season. In 1851, 
the cattle in Great Britain were estimated to amount to 
4,500,000. For the present year we have the returns for 
Scotland and Ireland, which amount, in the former country, 
to 974,816, and in the latter island, to 3,584,723 head. It is 
generally considered that about a fourth part of the entire 
stock is annually slaughtered for consumption, and we may 
therefore take it at two million head of cattle. It is to the 
large towns that cattle, live or dead, are chiefly brought for 
consumption. The number of beasts shown at “ the Great 
Christmas Cattle Market” has not very largely increased, but 
the weight and quality of meat are widely different from 
what they were some years ago. If we take the second im- 
portant town of the kingdom — Liverpool— we find the cattle- 
trade there of a very large extent; upwards of 1000 beasts 
are killed there weekly, besides other stock. The Liverpool 
[The number of importations, however, for 1856, of cattle, sheep, and pigs, 
is shown by the Government returns, to have fallen short of those of 1855 ; 
thus we received during the past year, 83,306 head of cattle in the place of 
97,527 of the present year; 145,059 sheep instead of 162,642; and 9,916 
pigs instead of 12,171.] 
