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EDITORS’ ADDRESS. 
with the largest amount of fat; when their object, as we think 
ourselves, ought rather to have been, to shew that such and such 
animals were capable of being made fat — fat enough at least for 
food — at a less cost than others of their species of a different breed. 
Here would have been shewn a practical good, from which a poor 
man as well as a rich man might have taken an useful lesson. In 
this case animals would not, on account of the expense, have been 
made so fat as they are now : there would have been more flesh or 
lean with the fat, and so the carcass would have been in a more 
edible and consequently in a more saleable condition. In the 
gross and blubbery state of fatness in which the animals for the 
most part now appear at the Show, it seems to us that they 
prove too much , — they prove that they have cost more than 
they are worth! And whatever opinions or speculations those 
who go to view them may form concerning their aptitude or dispo- 
sition to grow fat, the fact of more money having been expended 
on them than their sale will repay, stands awkwardly forward. 
Hence arises a disadvantage from making the show cattle so super- 
fluously fat. 
Anatomical researches teach us that, as fat increases, muscle or 
flesh decreases, shewing that we lose one way — though not to the 
same amount — what we gain in another ; and this process of sub- 
stitution may go on, as the over-fatted carcass demonstrates to us, 
until the happy climax is reached of having produced such a moun- 
tain of living adeps as will surely fetch a prize at the Show. A 
stall-fed ox is kept while being fattened in a state of rest or in- 
action, exercise being deemed — if not proved — to be a drawback on 
the process of fat-making. Pigs fattening in their styes will take no 
exercise after a certain advance to fatness : they will lie and sleep 
all day long, arousing themselves only at such times as fresh food 
is given them, or as they feel hungry. Although such confinement, 
however, may be most conducive to the accumulation of fat in the 
body of the animal, we very much doubt that the best or most 
grateful and wholesome meat is produced under this total absence 
of exercise or locomotion. The most prized beef we know to be that 
obtained from the ox that has been for a length of time at work, 
drawing cart or plough. The primest mutton comes from the six or 
seven-year-old wether sheep. Barn-door fowls are better eating than 
