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FASHIONING OF BREEDS
JAMES

THE

LOLI

ALISHSAIN

THE EVOLUTION OF BRITISH
CATTLE

THE EVOLUTION OF
BRITISH CATTLE

AND

THE FASHIONING OF BREEDS

BY

JAMES WILSON, M.A., B.Sc.

PROFESSOR OF AGRICULTURE IN
THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF SCIENCE FOR IRELAND, DUBLIN

LONDON
VINTON & COMPANY, Lt.
8, Bream’s Burtpincs, Cuancery Lane, E.C.

#999

CONTENTS

Bos PRIMIGENIUS

Bos LONGIFRONS

THE ROMAN CONTINGENT
THE ANGLO-SAXONS .
THE NORSE CONTINGENT.
THE DuTCH INVASION
THE FOUNDLINGS

THE MELTING-POT .
THE DUTCH SUPREMACY .
BAKEWELL .

BLENDING AND SORTING .

SPECULATIONS

INDEX

102
1 @ fe)
122

136

145

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Bos PRIMIGENIUS, FROM BURWELL FEN, CAMBRIDGE

Bos PRIMIGENIUS (SIDE VIEW), FROM BURWELL FEN,
CAMBRIDGE. 5 ‘ ; : Piguet ;

Bos LONGIFRONS, FROM SWEDEN é F r ‘ é
Bos LONGIFRONS, FROM SWITZERLAND. ‘ ‘eae
Bos LONGIFRONS, FROM BURWELL FEN, CAMBRIDGE

Bos LONGIFRONS, FROM IRELAND ‘ él ‘ ‘ ;

ROMANO-BRITISH SKULL, WITH UPTURNING HORN-CORES,
FROM REACH FEN, CAMBRIDGE . : : é f

ROMAN OX, FROM A PAINTING ON A WALL IN POMPEII.
OLD EGYPTIAN CATTLE f * ‘ ‘ : ;
SICILIAN OX . ‘ ‘ ‘ : ‘ } ;

ITALIAN OX . : ‘ ‘ A ; ‘ * ; r
ANCIENT EGYPTIAN CATTLE ‘ ‘ ; : ; ‘
OLD GLAMORGAN Cow . ¥ ‘ ‘ ‘ ' :

ABERGAVENNY BULLOCK ; ; ‘ ; ‘ , ‘
OLD DERBYSHIRE BULL : ; ‘ ‘ $

MODERN ITALIAN BULL : . ; ; " i ‘
CHILLINGHAM BULL . Sey ‘ . P H ‘

MAP OF THE BRITISH ISLANDS SHOWING THE LOCATIONS
OF THE HERDS IN HARTING’S LIST AND ALSO THE
APPROXIMATE DIRECTION OF GREEN’S LINE ‘ c

PAGE
II

Viil LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE DURHAM DuN Cow . ; ; . ‘ ; Sak
BURGHEAD BULLS . : A A bistig ieee ‘ ae
HORNLESS SKULL, FROM THE DUNSHAUGHLIN CRANNOGE 63

Swepignh FALL COW 1 a a a en ee

EVOLUTION OF BRITISH
CATTLE

I
BOS PRIMIGENIUS

In this volume it will be our duty again and
again to question, and sometimes to destroy,
many fondly cherished beliefs as to the origin
and history of the cattle of the British Isles,
and also as to the manner in which nearly every
breed has been evolved. Were our duty merely
to destroy, it could be pleasant neither in its
performance nor in the contemplation of its
results; but it is to be hoped that no belief
will be destroyed without a better one being put
forward in its place. Little would be gained, for
instance, by telling cattle owners that no British
breed, excepting, perhaps, the Sussex, could lay
serious claims to purity of blood in a long and
unbroken stream, unless it could be shown
that the most exalted breeds have attained
their present eminence entirely through the
mingling of diverse strains and races. Again,
I B

2 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

it would only irritate the people of Durham to
tell them that, when they set up a new cow in
their cathedral in place of the one that had done
duty for five hundred years, and when they took
such care that “the horns were made this time of
lead, lest she should ever again be reduced to the
condition of a polled beast,” they may have erred
in assuming that the older cow had ever horns
at all; although it might mollify them to know
that the legendary cow that was the means of
leading Saint Cuthbert’s body to Durham was
ornamented in a manner that neither the city nor
the county of Durham need be ashamed of.
And, although it may involve some risk to tell
a Highland laird that the origin of his majestic
breed is not “lost in the mists of antiquity,” or
the utilitarians of Aberdeen and Forfar that their
thrifty blacks are descended from small, thin-
fleshed, narrow-backed, sickle-hocked, light-dun
beasties, the risk may be minimised when it is
shown that the cattle of the Gaelic-speaking
Highlander in the west and the Scots-speaking
Lowlander in the east can be traced back to
those that accompanied their ancestors when
they came over the North Sea a thousand
years ago.

And we must play the Vandal at the very
beginning with one of the most picturesque stories
in which our cattle have ever played a part.
Writers who have speculated upon the ancestry

BOS PRIMIGENIUS 3

of British cattle have been struck by the pheno-
menon that, while the vast majority have been
domesticated for many centuries, there still exists
in England and Scotland a small number of
herds which, though they have been enclosed in
parks and thus far partially tamed, have never
yet, to all appearance, been brought under the
yoke.

At the present day these herds are few, but
it has been shown that, in former times, such
herds existed in certain parts of the country in
considerable number.’ The likeness of these wild
cattle to some of our domestic breeds has been
frequently commented upon. Some writers have
remarked their resemblance to the so-called
creamy-white Highlanders, the white cattle of
Wales, and the white-coloured Shorthorns ; others
have noticed that their horns were like those of
the black breeds of Ireland and Wales, and, in
less degree, like those of the red-coloured cattle
of Devon; while some have seen in these wild
white cattle a strong resemblance, both in size and
shape, to the modern Ayrshires.

These resemblances led many writers to
conclude that the wild white cattle, and most of
our domestic breeds, are of the self-same race,
descended from the same original stock, and
that, while in bygone times the ancestors of the
domestic ones had been captured and tamed, the

! Harting’s “ Extinct British Animals,” 1880.

4 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

ancestors of the wild ones, by some lucky chance,
had escaped the thrall of man.

The problem of tracing the ancestry of the
whole was thus narrowed down to tracing that
of a very few, and not only from their very
picturesqueness, and the fact that they had never
been tamed, but also because they had been
referred to more than once in early writings, the
wild white cattle afforded the most attractive clue.

The first step into the past was obvious and
clear: it was to a spirited description of the
Chillingham herd, written towards the end of the
eighteenth century by Mr. Bailey, of Chillingham,
and printed by George Culley in his ‘ Observa-
tions on Live Stock ” :—

“The wild breed, from being untameable, can
only be kept within walls or good fences ; conse-
quently very few of them are now to be met with,
except in the parks of some gentlemen, who keep
them for ornament, and asa curiosity ; those I have
seen are at Chillingham-Castle, in Northumber-
land, a seat belonging to the Earl of Tankerville.
Their colour is invariably of a creamy white;
muzzle black; the whole of the inside of the
ear, and about one-third of the outside, from the
tips downwards, red; horns white, with black
tips, very fine, and bent upwards; some of
the bulls have a thin upright mane, about an
inch and a half or two inches long. The
weight of the oxen is from 35 to 45 st., and the

BOS PRIMIGENIUS 5

cows from 25 to 35 st. the four quarters (14 lb.
the stone).
* ® * * *

‘At the first appearance of any person they
set off in full gallop, and, at a distance of about
two hundred yards, make a wheel round and
come boldly up again, tossing their heads in a
menacing manner; on a sudden they make a full
stop at a distance of forty or fifty yards, looking
wildly at the object of their surprise, but upon
the least motion being made, they all turn round,
and fly off with equal speed, but not to the same
distance, forming a shorter circle, and then
returning with a bolder and more threatening
aspect than before; they approach much nearer,
probably within thirty yards, when they again
make another stand, and again fly off. This
they do several times, shortening their distance,
and advancing nearer and nearer, till they come
within such a short distance, that most people think
it prudent to leave them, not chusing to provoke
them further.

“The mode of killing them was perhaps the
only modern remains of the grandeur of ancient
hunting. On notice being given that a wild bull
would be killed on a certain day, the inhabitants
of the neighbourhood came mounted and armed
with guns, etc., sometimes to the amount of an
hundred horse, and four or five hundred foot,
who stood upon walls or got into trees,

6 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

while the horsemen rode off the bull from the
rest of the herd till he stood at bay, when a
marksman dismounted and shot. At some of
these huntings twenty or thirty shots have been
fired before he was subdued. On such occasions
the bleeding victim grew desperately furious,
from the smarting of his wounds and the shouts
of savage joy that were echoing from every side.
But from the number of accidents that happened,
this dangerous mode has been little practised of
late years, the park-keeper alone generally
shooting them with a rifled gun at one shot.
‘When the cows calve, they hide their calves
for a week or ten days in some sequestered
situation, and go and suckle them two or three
times a day. If any persons come near the
calves, they clap their heads close to the ground
and lie like an hare in form, to hide themselves ;
this is a proof of their native wildness, and is
corroborated by the following circumstance that
happened to the writer of this narrative, who
found an hidden calf, two days old, very lean
and very weak. On stroking its head it got up,
pawed two or three times like an old bull, stepped
back a few steps, and Jdolted at his legs with all
its force ; it then began to paw again, stepped
back, and bolted as before, but, knowing its
intent, and stepping aside, it missed him, fell,
and was so very weak that it could not rise,
tho’ it made several efforts: but it had done

BOS PRIMIGENIUS 7

enough—the whole herd were alarmed, and,
coming to its rescue, obliged him to retire; for
the dams will allow no persons to touch their
calves, without attacking them with impetuous
ferocity.”

The next step was longer, but it was none
the less obvious. It was to the wild cattle
roaming the forest in unstinted freedom before
the Norman barons or their successors took to
enclosing parks for the preservation of game.
Medizval conditions lingered longest in some
parts of Scotland, and thence about 1526 from
the pen of Hector Boece, came the picture that
fascinated the imagination and indicated the
path to be followed if the ancestors of the wild
white cattle were to be found.

‘At this toun began the grit wod of Calidon.*
This wod of Calidon ran fra Striveling, throw
Menteith and Stratherne, to Atholl and Loch-
quabir, as Ptolome writtis in his first table. In
this wod wes sum time quhit bullis, with crisp
and curland mane, like feirs lionis, and thoucht
they semit meek and tame in the remanent
figure of thair bodyis, thay wer mair wild than
ony uthir beistis, and had sic hatrent aganis the
-societe and cumpany of men, that thay come
nevir in the wodis, nor lesuris quhair thay fand
ony feit or haind thairof, any mony dayis eftir,

1 Bellenden’s translation. See Low’s “ Domesticated Animals,”
Pp. 234.

8 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

thay eit nocht of the herbis that wer twichit or
handillit by men. Thir bullis wer sa wild, that
thay wer nevir tane but slight and crafty laubour,
and sa impacient that, eftir thair taking, they
deit for importable doloure. Alse sone as ony
man invadit thir bullis they ruschit with so
terrible preis on him, that they dang him to the
eird, takand na feir of houndis, scharp lancis, nor
uthir maist penitrive wapinnis. . . . And thoucht
thir bullis wer bred in sindry boundis of the
Calidon Wod, now, be contiwal hunting and lust
of insolent men, thay are distroyit in all partis of
Scotland, and nane of thaim left but allanerlie in
Cumarnald.”

Nor can it be denied that the impression
made by Boece was deepened by Sir Walter

Scott—

“ Through the huge oaks of Evandale,!
Whose limbs a thousand years have worn,
What sullen roar comes down the gale,
And drowns the hunter’s pealing horn ?

“ Mightiest of all the beasts of chase,
That roam in woody Caledon,
Crashing the forest in his race,
The Mountain Bull comes thundering on.

“ Fierce on the hunter’s quiver’d band,
He rolls his eyes of swarthy glow,
Spurns, with black hoof and horn, the sand,
And tosses high his mane of snow.

‘* Aim’d well, the Chieftain’s lance has flown,
Struggling in blood the savage lies ;
His roar is sunk in hollow groan—
Sound, merry huntsmen ! sound the Jryse.”

1 Ballad of Cadzow Casile.

BOS PRIMIGENIUS 9

The ancestors of the British wild cattle were
therefore mighty and untameable monsters of
unconquerable ferocity, and none could be found
more likely than the Uri of the Hercynian forest
in Western Germany. Cesar describes three
extraordinary animals there: first, a stag-like
ox, with a horn springing from the middle of its
forehead between the ears. Next, an elk with
no knots or joints in its legs,’ which could not lie
down. If it fell by accident it could not get up
again, and, so, it must recline against trees by way
of going to bed, a habit which was its undoing,
for the Germans of those days undermined or
weakened the trees and, so, captured the elks that
leant against them and fell. Last, the Uri.’

“The third of these three beasts are called
Uri. In size they are a trifle smaller than
elephants; in kind, colour, and shape they are
bulls. Great is their strength and great their
speed; nor, having espied them, do they spare
either men or beasts. They are sedulously
captured in pits and slain: the young men
hardening themselves by such toil and training
themselves by this kind of sport: and they who
have killed most Uri, proclaimed as such by
the horns being exhibited in public, receive
great commendation. But it is not possible to
accustom the Urito men or to tame them, not

1 Crura sine nodis articulisque habent.
2 “Gallic War,” bk. vi. chapter xxviii.

10 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

even though they are caught young. Their
horns differ much in size, shape, and kind from
those of our cattle. They are anxiously sought
after, the lips mounted with silver, and used
as cups at the most abundant banquets.”

The final step was from Cesar’s Urus to a
British relative whose occasional remains have been
found in primeval Scots bogs and East Anglian
fens and in alluvial and lacustrine deposits whose
hospitality they have shared with the elephant,
the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, and other
aforetime inhabitants of England and Scotland
since Neolithic times. This ox was of gigantic
proportions. McKenny Hughes’ describes it as
“a large, gaunt beast with a long, narrow face.”
Fleming says,” “ Many of the skulls which occur
in marl-pits in Scotland exhibit dimensions
superior to those of the largest domestic breed.
A skull in my possession measures twenty-seven
inches and a half in length, and eleven inches
and a half across the orbits.” Owen, in de-
scribing a skull in the British Museum found
near Atholl in Perthshire, says, “The skull is
one yard in length and the span of the horn-
cores is three feet six inches.”* The accompany-
ing drawings, in McKenny Hughes’s paper, from
an ox of this kind “found in Burwell Fen, near

1 “On the more important Breeds of Cattle which have been
recognised in the British Isles,” 1896, p. 6.

2 “History of British Animals,” 1828, p. 24.

3 “British Fossil Mammals,” 1846, p. 501.

BOS PRIMIGENIUS II

Cambridge, with a polished stone implement stick-
ing in its skull,” ? will indicate the relationship that

BOS PRIMIGENIUS, FROM BURWELL FEN, CAMBRIDGE.
[From McKenny Hughes.

BOS PRIMIGENIUS (SIDE VIEW), FROM BURWELL FEN, CAMBRIDGE.
[from McKenny Hughes.

subsisted between this animal and Neolithic man.
1 OD. cit.

12 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

What we are asked to believe is that our wild
white cattle, and some at least of our domestic
breeds trace back direct to this ancient giant,
Bos primigenius. Sentiment and vanity tempt us
to accept the belief, although we admit, in doing
so, that our forefathers have left us a sadly
degenerate legacy. We must dissent, however,
from other considerations, the chief of which is
that no remains of Bos primigenius have been
found in deposits later than those of the Bronze
Age. “The Urus or Bos primigenius .. . is
characteristic of the time when men used polished
stone implements, that is, of the Neolithic or
Newer Stone Age. It probably did not become
extinct until the Bronze Age.” *

Even were the geological record less clear, it
would still be difficult to prove that Bos primz-
genius was the ancestor of our modern cattle.
The skeletal inconsistencies are too great.
Leaving other considerations aside, and taking
Fleming’s measurements, which are the smallest,
it is inconceivable that an animal whose skull was
27 inches long by 11 inches broad should be
the ancestor of, say, the modern Shorthorn, an
animal not much younger in time, whose skull
is 23 or 24 inches long by 11 or 12 broad: that
is, that the ratio of length to breadth should
change from 25 to 7.

It has been maintained that Bos primigenius

1 McKenny Hughes.

BOS PRIMIGENIUS 13

may have crossed with his contemporary Bos
longifrons, an animal about the size of a Kerry,
and that some of our cattle are descended from
the cross. Had such a cross taken place, cattle
skeletally intermediate between Los longifrons
and Bos primigenius must have resulted ; but of
such there is no evidence ; and Bos longifrons has
remained essentially the same right through the
period when he was contemporary with Bos
primigenius down to the present time.

It has also been maintained by those who
hold that the wild white cattle at least are
descended from Bos primigenius, that they have
deteriorated in size through confinement and
consequent in-breeding. This presumes that
they were giants at the time they were emparked.
Had they deteriorated, as we are asked to
believe, some of them in four or five centuries,
some of them in two, such a phenomenon would
not have escaped notice till the nineteenth
century. And surely, since some herds were
still at liberty centuries after others had been
emparked, the contrast in size between the bond
and the free would have been recorded had it
been there to record. Besides, what evidence
have we that cattle or any other polygamous
animals deteriorate in size through in-breeding ?
As for Czsar’s Urus, Urochs, Aurox, Aurochs,
the primeval ancestral bull, the father of the race:
is it to be taken seriously? Then, so must his

14 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

one-horned ox, and his jointless elk. But is it
possible for the Urus to have lived in Germany
so long after he was extinct in Britain? and if
he lived in Czesar’s time, would he have been
called the Uv-ochs? Even so, was. the
Hercynian forest his likeliest habitation? It
is far more easy to imagine either that some
diplomatic and genial German had invented a
tale to deter the great Roman general and please
the imperial note-taker or that Cesar was really
describing the bison.

I]
BOS LONGIFRONS

Havine driven off Bos primigenius, we ought now
to follow up the wild white bull that led us off
the scent ; but it will be more convenient to leave
him alone for the present and pick him up again
in his proper place.

We are told by those who collect and con-
sider the records of the past—the geologist, the
archzologist, and the historian—that the animals
that have lived in Britain and Western Europe
at one time and another have all migrated thither
from the East. Bos primigenius, who was one of
the early arrivals, came westward just before the
Pleistocene, or Glacial period—‘‘a prolonged
period of cold broken up by shorter periods of
milder climate” ’—and he lived through that
period and several sections of the next, in whose
elucidation the geologist and the archzologist
combine.

The earliest signs of man appear about the
beginning of this next period, which is conveni-
ently broken into sections or ages marked off

* Sir Archibald Geikie’s “ Class-Book of Geology,” 1897.
15

16 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

from each other by the degree of civilisation
to which man had attained: viz. the Eolithic Age
in which man makes use of only such tools as he
picks up that are already shaped by Nature’s
hand, the Palzolithic Age in which he chips and
fashions stones to suit his purpose, the Neolithic
Age in which he works stones into shape by
rubbing and polishing, and the succeeding Ages
of Bronze and Iron.

The man of the Neolithic Age was not only
a far later arrival than those who had lived before
him, but his civilisation was at a very much
higher level. According to Boyd Dawkins, ‘“‘ The
population” of Britain ‘was probably large,
divided into tribal communities possessed of fixed
habitations, and living principally on their flocks
and herds, acquainted with agriculture, and sub-
sisting in a lesser degree by hunting and fishing.
The arts of spinning, weaving, mining, and
pottery-making were known, and that of boat-
building had advanced sufficiently far to allow
of voyages being made from France to Britain,
and from Britain to Ireland.”* That man still
hunted the beasts of the forest is proved by the
ox in theW oodwardian Museum “ with a polished
stone implement sticking in its skull,” but the
state of his larder depended no longer upon his
success with the Urus, since another much smaller
ox had come westward with Neolithic man, and,

1 “ Early Man in Britain,” 1880, p. 290,

BOS LONGIFRONS 17

according to Boyd Dawkins and Riitimeyer, was
already in the domesticated state." At any rate,
the remains of this little ox, which Owen called
Bos longifrons because of the great depth of his
forehead, have been found in Britain and Western
Europe in all kinds of deposits from Neolithic
down to the beginning of historic time; and, if
he was not brought into Britain in the domestic
state, he eventually became the domestic ox of

BOS LONGIFRONS, FROM SWEDEN.
[From Nilsson.

the pre-Roman inhabitants, for no other kind was
brought into the country previous to the Roman
Invasion. Cattle could only have been imported
from the opposite shores of France and Belgium,
and there they belonged to the self-same race.
Bos longifrons ‘‘is the native breed with which
we must start in all our speculations as to the
origin and development of British oxen. The
Romans found that breed here and no other.” ?

1 [bid., p. 261, and “ Encyc. Brit.,” v. 245.
2 McKenny Hughes, of. cit.

18 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

Bos longifrons has been reconstructed again
and again from his resurrected skeleton. From
Swedish skeletons Nilsson describes him thus!:
“This is the smallest of all the ox tribe which
lived in a wild state in our portion of the globe.
To judge from the skeleton, it was 5 feet 4 inches

BOS LONGIFRONS—FROM SWITZERLAND.

From Riitimeyer.
long from the nape to the end of the rump bone,
the head about 1 foot 4 inches, so that the whole
length must have been 6 feet 8 inches. From
the slender make of its bones, its body must
rather have resembled a deer than our common
tame ox; its legs at the extremities are certainly
somewhat shorter and also thinner than those of

1 “Annals and Magazine of Natural History,” vol. iv. second
series, 1849, p. 352.

BOS LONGIFRONS 19

a crown-deer (full-antler’d red deer).” Rtitimeyer
calls it the peat cow, and, from specimens found
in Swiss late dwellings, describes it thus’: ‘The
race which clearly predominated through the
whole Stone Age and was found chiefly, though
not exclusively, in the formations which we, upon
other grounds, reckon among the oldest in

BOS LONGIFRONS, FROM BURWELL FEN, CAMBRIDGE.
[From McKenny Hughes.

Wangen and Mooseedorf, I may safely call the
Peat Race, or the Peat Cow. Its chief character-
istic, as shown by its remains, apart meantime
from the skull, is the small length and height
of its body, and the exceptionally short but
remarkably fine and delicate limbs, right from the
shoulder to the extreme terminal phalanges, which
apparently carried very small hoofs.”

From British and Irish skeletons, Owen

1 Fauna der Pfahlbauten.

20 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

writes’ that ‘This small but ancient species or
variety of ox belongs, like our present cattle, to
the subgenus Jos, as is shown by the form of the
forehead, and by the origin of the horns from
the extremities of the occipital ridge; but it
differs from the contemporary Bos primigenius,
not only by its great inferiority of size, being
smaller than the ordinary breeds of domestic
cattle, but also by the horns being proportionally

BOS LONGIFRONS, FROM IRELAND.
[From Owen.

much smaller and shorter, as well as differently
directed, and by the forehead being less concave.
It is indeed, usually flat; and the frontal bones
extend further beyond the orbits, before they join
the nasal bones, than in Bos primigenius. The
horn-cores of the Bos longzfrons describe a single
short curve outwards and forwards in the plane of
the forehead, rarely rising above that plane, more
rarely sinking below it: the cores have a very
rugged exterior, and are usually a little flattened

1 “ British Fossil Mammals and Birds,” p. 510.

BOS LONGIFRONS 21

at their upper part.” McKenny Hughes, also
from British and Irish skeletons, says’ that ‘“‘ Bos
longifrons was a very small animal; probably not
larger than a Kerry cow. It was remarkable for
the height of its forehead above its orbits, for its
strongly developed occipital region, and its small
horns curved inward and forward.”

There have also been speculations as to the
colours of both these ancient oxen, but in neither
case have they been based upon sure foundations.
As regards Bos primigenius, the foundations
were absolutely unsafe, for Czsar’s hint is of no
value, even if we knew the colour that was in
his mind when he wrote of the Uri that “in
kind, colour, and shape they are bulls”; nor can
the colour of an animal so long extinct be inferred
from the great variety among the larger European
breeds of the present day, were it even clear
that these are the descendants of Bos primigenius.
As to the colour of the pre-historic Bos longifrons,
speculators are upon much safer ground, since
many of his descendants are still alive. But
there is always the difficulty of eliminating the
colours of intruding races, or, of intruding breeds,
in the case of some particular branch of the Bos
longifrons race. Werner,’ who had the continental
Bos longifrons chiefly in his mind, ‘describes the

1 Of. cit., p.9.
2 “Ein Beitrage zur Geschichte des Europdischen Hausrindes,”

1892.

22 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

breed as a small form, of slender, almost graceful
build. The hide is of a uniform yellowish-grey,
grey, or brown tint, white patches being un-
common. Other characteristics are, a lighter
streak round the muzzle, a light iris, a black
stripe down the back, the lighter colour of the
belly and the inner side of the legs, the occur-
rence of lighter coloured hair. within the outer
ear, and long hairs on the rim of it. The skin
and muzzle are always black in colour.”* While
Boyd Dawkins, who dealt with the British Bos
longifrons, came to the conclusion that the breed
was usually of a dark colour probably black, red,
and brindled.* These authors inferred the colours
of the original Bos longifrous from the colours
of separate branches of his presumed descendants,
while Boyd Dawkins also took into account some
specimens of hair which have been found in pre-
historic deposits. Both failed to allow for the
effects of variation or of intruding breeds or
races, With Werner’s conclusions we have no
immediate concern; but, as we shall see later,
the reds and the brindles which Boyd Dawkins
took to be the original natives of Britain were
really intruders.

To show that the British variety of Sos
longifrons was black, we must anticipate some
part of what is to follow, on the understanding

1 Quoted from McKenny Hughes, of. cit.
2 “ Cave Hunting.”

BOS LONGIFRONS 23

that what is now taken on credit will be made
good hereafter. It is a well-known fact in
human history that, as one race retires before
another, the retiring and the invading races are
usually accompanied by some part of their live
stock, and above all by their cattle which, in
earlier times, not only afforded food and clothing
but took a chief share in tilling the earth, and
thus were an outstanding necessity in man’s
existence. The Helvetii, and Cassievelaunus,
the British chief who drove his people and their
flocks into the woods on the approach of the
Romans in Czsar’s time, and the Spaniards, the
English, and the Boers in recent times might
be referred to as examples. When the Celtic
people retired before the English they carried
their cattle along with them into the west and
the north; and till this day, the cattle in the
Celtic parts of Britain, which are descended from
the cattle of the pre-Roman Celts, and through
them from the pre-historic Bos longifrons, are
predominantly black, and, as we look farther and
farther into the past, we find the territory of
these black cattle larger, and the regularity of
their colour increasing. Till nearly the end
of the seventeenth century, Scotland, Ireland,
Wales, Cornwall, and the north of England
were almost fully occupied by black cattle, among
which there was a sprinkling of reds, whites, and
brindles, and an occasional dun; in still earlier

24 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

times the cattle of these other colours were rare
enough to be of higher value. But the alien
colours can all be accounted for. The whites
were brought in by the Romans, the reds by the
English, the brindles were the result of another
importation, while the duns were one of the many
things for which we have to thank the Norsemen.

Ill
THE ROMAN CONTINGENT

ALTHOUGH the opinion that the wild white cattle
were the untamed descendants of the mighty
Urus was at one time widely believed, there
grew up a body of dissenters, among whom
Owen,’ Boyd Dawkins,? and Dr. J. A. Smith?
were notable, who were sceptical, first, of our
domestic cattle being descended from Bos primz-
genius; next, of the wild white cattle being
descended from the same source ; and, lastly, of
these same wild white cattle being descended
from wild cattle at all. The views of the sceptics
were thus boldly expressed in Alston’s ‘“ Fauna
of Scotland,” published in 1876: “To me the
evidence appears overwhelmingly to prove that
the modern park cattle are not wild survivors
of the Urus, but are the descendants of a race
which had escaped from domestication, and had
lived a feral life till they were enclosed in the
parks and chases of the medieval magnates.”
1 “ British Fossil Mammals and Birds.”

2 “ Cave Hunting,” and “ Early Man in Britain.”
3 “ Notes on the Ancient Cattle of Scotland.”

25

26 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

The first to trace the white park cattle and
white domestic cattle back to their source was Pro-
fessor McKenny Hughes, of Cambridge.’ In the
course of excavations “over areas long occupied
by the Romans” he found a change coming
over the remains of the cattle deposited there.
He found evidence of a new breed mingling with
the old. ‘The new breed is larger, the horn-

ROMANO-BRITISH SKULL, WITH UPTURNING HORN-CORES,
FROM REACH FEN, CAMBRIDGE.

[From Mc Kenny Hughes.
cores are stouter in proportion to their length,
and, starting from the side of the head, have a
tendency outward and upward, instead of having
the strong forward curve of Bos longifrons. All
intermediate sizes and shapes are found, from the
small native to the new improved breed... .
The specimen I have figured ””—the skull figured
here—‘“ was found in the peat near Reach Lode,

1 See work already quoted.

THE ROMAN CONTINGENT 27

north of Cambridge. One remarkable fact is
worth recording in relation to this skull. The
peat-diggers, as their long trenches approached
Reach Lode, always came upon a sort of bank,
where the peat was harder and mixed with earthy
material. This indicated that there had been a
fosse dug through the peat to the underlying
marl and clay, and that the bank was the upcast
from this fosse. It was in the direct line from
Reach to Upware, starting from near the great
quarries which may date from Roman times, and
from the end of the Devil’s Ditch, along which
sO many remains have been found, and pointing
straight for the southern end of the Upware
island, where also there are abundant traces of
Roman occupation. All the Roman pottery from
this part of the fenland which I have been able to
trace to its exact locality, was found along the
line of this raised bank.”

Starting from this hint, McKenny Hughes
went on to inquire into the kind of cattle most
likely to have been brought into Britain by the
Romans. They could not have been the native
cattle of France, for, being of the same type,
these could have brought about no change in the
character of the cattle in Britain. They must
have come either immediately or originally from
beyond the Alps. Having eliminated Italian
cattle of recent introduction to Italy, and con-
sidered the evidence from coins and _ similar

28 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

sources, McKenny Hughes came to the con-
clusion that the race which the Romans were
most likely to have introduced to Britain was
the large white race which, in ancient as in
modern times, stretched eastwards and south-
wards into Asia and Egypt.

Could any resemblances be traced between
the old white cattle of Southern Europe and
those whose bones lay in the Roman rubbish
heaps of Britain? And were their presumable
descendants in any way alike? The first link
was found in the fact that, while the horns of
Bos longifrons curved forward and inward, the
horns of the old southern cattle curved decidedly
upward. So also, as shown by their cores, did
the horns of the new breed that came into
Britain with the Romans. Another link was
found in the length and shape of the horns.
The horns of the old southern cattle not only
turned upward, but were lyre-shaped, with a
peculiar final bend, and many of them were of
extraordinary length. The same characteristics
are found not only among modern breeds of this
South European race, but also among English
breeds descended certainly from cattle brought
into the country within historical time, and, pre-
sumably, from those brought in by the Romans.
The accompanying illustrations will make this
point clear.

Another link was found in the fact that

THE ROMAN CONTINGENT 29

the English park cattle and the South European
race were of the same colour, viz. white with
black “points”; that is, the body white, the
muzzle and ears black, and the ears lined and

d

y moe

evant

ROMAN OX, FROM A PAINTING OLD EGYPTIAN CATTLE.
ON A WALL IN POMPEII. [From McKenny Hughes.
[From McKenny Hughes.

SICILIAN OX. ITALIAN OX.
[From McKenny Hughes. [From McKenny Hughes.

the muzzle encircled with black or brown hairs.
Black or brown patches are sometimes found on
other parts of the body and, frequently, below
the knee. The extraordinary resemblance be-
tween the English park cattle and the cattle of

42NeNy UOT |

‘AILLVO NVILGAOA LNAIONV

ABERGAVENNY BULLOCK.
[From McKenny Hughes.

Z 1
| \! pth
ie

OLD DERBYSHIRE BULL.

[From Youatt.

32 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

modern Italy is thus expressed by McKenny
Hughes’: “If a selection of the lighter coloured
individuals of the common draught-ox of Italy
were turned out in a park in England, no one
would suspect that they did not belong to the
wild white breed. ... A comparison of the
skeleton of the Chillingham bull in the British
Museum with that of an Italian bull presented by

MODERN ITALIAN BULL. CHILLINGHAM BULL.
[From McKenny Hughes. [From McKenny Hughes.

the King of Italy, shows that there is no essential
difference between them.”

A short consideration of a few other circum-
stances will make the connection between the two
sets of cattle still clearer. AA Roman colony was
not altogether parallel to many of our modern
colonies. The Romans in Britain were rather
organisers of an empire than colonists. They did

1 OD. cit., p. 20.

THE ROMAN CONTINGENT 33

not drive away the Britons as the Europeans
drove away the red Indians, but settled among
them much as the English have settled in India.
Their policy was to bring civilisation, industry,
and commerce to the people they had conquered ;
to build towns and cities ; to set up such a system
of military stations as would secure their enter-
prise from enemies both within and without ; and
to lay down such a net-work of roads as would
afford ready and easy communication between all
parts of the country. Only a small proportion of
the Romans took to farming, and these only in
the neighbourhood of towns and military stations,
or in districts with a comparatively dense and
homogeneous Roman population. Consequently
the Roman cattle were confined to the vicinity of
towns and military stations, and, a large number
being required for transport and other military
purposes, it is inconceivable that many got into
the hands of the natives.

The nature of the Roman evacuation of
Britain is well known. It was almost a rout:
a kind of forced march in which every impedi-
ment was left behind and only fighting gear and
the minimum of food supplies were carried. The
necessary transport animals were taken away, but
cows and young stock, which would have been an
insufferable encumbrance, were left behind. We
know also the state of the country after the flight
of the Romans; how the unsettled natives had

D

34 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

little more than time to think of settling down
when the Saxon was upon them. They managed
to take possession of some of the cattle left behind —
by the Romans, but the rest were bound to have
become feral. Then, as the natives were pushed
westward and northward, the Roman cattle they
had been unable to secure were left behind to
fend for themselves in the forests. For some
centuries more, the country from which the Celts
had been expelled was the arena of strife and
war, by no means thickly populated, and exposed
on the western border to continual rieving and
raiding. And, so, when the Normans came in,
they found the Roman cattle no longer quiet and
uncomplaining animals of burden, but wild and
ferocious beasts of chase.

In connection with these white cattle, there is
a series of facts which corroborates in a remark-
able manner the views which have just been set
forth. It is well known that the Romans had no
hold upon Scotland north of the Grampians, and
none at all upon Ireland. It is also well known
that the English pressed into England from the
Southern and Eastern coasts. That being so,
these Roman cattle ought to have been confined
to Wales, the North-west of England, and the
South of Scotland. It is also well known that,
while a large part of England was sunk in
struggle and strife, during the Saxon period,
Wales stood aside in comparative quiet. That also

THE ROMAN CONTINGENT 35

being so, we should expect the Roman cattle that
were driven into Wales to have remained tame,
while those that remained in England became
feral. And our expectations are correct. The
Roman cattle were confined almost without
exception to the parts of the island indicated, and
while they were tame in Wales they were feral
in England and Scotland. And not only so,
but Harting drew up a list of the places at
which they are known to have been emparked,'
and every one of those places in England and
Scotland is situated well on the west or just
immediately to the east of what we may call
Green’s line: ‘“‘ The conquest of the bulk of
Britain was now (about 588) complete. East-
ward of a line which may be roughly drawn along
the moorlands of Northumberland and Yorkshire,
through Derbyshire and skirting the forest of
Arden, to the mouth of the Severn, and thence
by Mendip to the sea, the land had passed into
English hands. From this time the character of
the conquest of Britain had wholly changed.
The older wars of extermination came to an end
and as the invasion pushed westward in later
times the Britons were no longer driven from the
soil, but mingled with their conquerors.” ?

The accompanying map shows the locations

? “British Animals Extinct within Historic Times,” 1880.

* “Short History of the English People,” illustrated edition
Pp. 29.

36 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE
a

ep

Map of the British Islands, showing the locations of the Herds
in Harting’s list, and also the approximate direction of Green’s
line. Existing herds are denoted by capital letters.

THE ROMAN CONTINGENT 37

of the herds in Harting’s list and also the approxi-
mate direction of Green’s line. The herds that
still exist are denoted by capital letters. The
Blair Atholl herd has been removed to North
Wales and the Middleton herd to Norfolk. Some
of these herds are or were polled, a matter which
will be discussed later.

IV
THE ANGLO-SAXONS

Ir we remember the point made two chapters
back that, in their migrations, human races are
usually accompanied by their domestic animals,
we know at once to look across the North Sea
into Western Germany for the cattle that came
in to fill up the gap left by the departure of the
Celtic and Roman cattle into the west and the
north, The nature of the English migration is
first indicated in Bede’s “ Ecclesiastical History.”
The English were eventually an amalgamation
of, at least, three tribes: the Jutes from what is
now Jutland, the Angles from what is now
Schleswig-Holstein, and the Saxons from the
country south of that and westwards towards
Holland and the Frisian islands. Bede, in
telling from which of these tribes the people in
different parts of England are descended, says :*
‘“‘From the Angles, that is, the country which is
called Anglia, and which is said, from that time,
to remain desert to this day,? between the

1 “ Ecclesiastical History,” Bohn’s edition, p. 24,
2 Bede lived from about 677 to 735.

38

THE ANGLO-SAXONS 39

provinces of the Jutes and the Saxons, are
descended the East-Angles, the Midland-Angles,”
and so on, while John Richard Green, who might
almost be said to have lived in this part of
history, writes thus— *

“Tt was the slowness of their advance, the
small numbers of each separate band in its
descent upon the coast, that made it possible for
the invaders to bring with them, when the work
was done, the wives and children, the laet and
the slave, even the cattle they had left behind
them. The wave of conquest was thus but a
prelude to the gradual migration of the whole
people. For the settlement of the conquerors
was nothing less than a transfer of English
society to the shores of Britain. It was England
that settled down on English soil.”

But these quotations may not be sufficiently
convincing that nearly the whole of the English part
of England was wholly populated with English
cattle, more especially as the cattle of North-
umbria, which was one of the parts occupied by
the Angles who, according to Bede, made the
most complete migration, were still of the old
black Celtic colour down to the beginning of the
eighteenth century. But that is the only
discrepancy, and it is not inexplicable; for in
the days of the English invasion it was a far way
to carry cattle from Schleswig to Yorkshire,

1 “The Making of England,” p. 153.

40 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

and, if only a few were carried, their colours would
soon have been swamped by the dominant black
of the natives,

The cattle in the rest of the English part of
England were brought over by the invaders from
Western Germany. To prove this statement we
must show that the cattle in the south were
different from those in the rest of England in
Anglo-Saxon times, and also, if possible, that
others of their kind had been left behind them in
Germany. One fact must be borne in mind,
namely, that, from the final settling down of the
English till the junction of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries there was very little move-
ment of cattle or other live stock, with the
exception of horses. We may therefore assume
that, if a race of cattle is found occupying any
particular part of the country about the end of
the seventeenth or early in the eighteenth
century, it had occupied that same part for nearly
a thousand years.

It is unfortunate that, although much has been
written of the history of British cattle since the
middle of the eighteenth century, the period
immediately before that is almost without a
record. We must therefore, to some extent, fill
in this period by reference to what came after.
Since the first half of the eighteenth century
there have been no more striking phenomena
than the advent and progress of two great breeds,

THE ANGLO-SAXONS 41

the Longhorn and the Shorthorn. These in
succession swept out many of the old local breeds
and occupied their ground instead; and thus,
where, say, the Longhorn was found in 1775, a
totally different breed would have been found a
hundred years before. What these other breeds
were we can infer from the undisplaced breeds
around them, and, if possible, find confirmation
elsewhere. For example, the Longhorn came
into prominence in the English Midlands in the
first half of the eighteenth century, and spread
gradually southwards as well as in other directions
like a rising lake, submerging, as it were, all the
existing breeds excepting those that stood high
upon the banks around. The southern unsub-
merged breeds, with one exception, to which we
shall refer later, had many characters in common,
but one in particular, that they were all red.
Similarly the unsubmerged northern cattle were
all black. There is no difficulty in showing that
the cattle in Scotland and the North of England
were black two centuries ago, for, it will be found
from the agricultural and statistical surveys
published at the instance of the first Board of
Agriculture that they were black at a date still
later, while two quotations from Gervaise Mark-
ham will show that towards the end of the seven-
teenth century the black race reached south into
England as far as a line drawn approximately
from Staffordshire to Yorkshire: ‘As touching

42 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

the right Breed of Kine through our Nation, it
generally affordeth very good ones, yet some
Countries so far exceed other countries, as
Cheshire, Lancashire, Yorkshire and Derbyshire
for black Kine,” and ‘Those that were bred in
York-shire, Darby-shire, Lancashire, and semen
shire were generally all black.” ?

That the red race possessed the rest of the
country till the eighteenth, or at any rate till the
seventeenth, century is practically certain, but
the proof is less direct than clear. The question
is complicated by several factors : by the importa-
tion of red and white flecked cattle to Lincoln
and some other eastern counties in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, by the advent of the new
breed—the Longhorns—in the eighteenth century,
by the breaking down of the old English system
of agriculture which did not encourage the move-
ment of cattle, by the growth of London, and by
“the graziers having mixed the cattle more or
less in each county.”* We can look backwards,
however, and keep these points in mind in doing so.
At the present day we see the south of England
encircled by a broken band of red-coloured cattle
—the Lincolns, the Norfolks and Suffolks, the
Sussex, the South and North Devons, and the
Herefords. According to Youatt and Marshall

1 “ The English House-Wife,” 1683.
2 “Cheap and Good Husbandry,” 1683, p. 69.
3 “Compleat Body of Husbandry,” 1757, vol. iii, p. 36.

i eee ie ag ee pee
Es A ear go Sn ce

a eM So,

Sn

THE ANGLO-SAXONS 43

this band was not only continuous a century ago
(with one exception), but it was also broader, that
is, reaching farther inland. Hale and Markham
indicate that it was still broader in their day.
Youatt and the writers of the Southern
Agricultural Surveys refer again and again to
the southern march of the Longhorns and the
expulsion of the cattle that were there before
them. From these considerations we may say,
without doubt, that the red race of cattle, whose
representatives to-day are the Lincolns, the
Norfolks and Suffolks, the Sussex, the Devons,
and the Herefords, were in possession of the
southern half of England till towards the close of
the eighteenth century. [If still further evidence
were required, a very interesting statement of
Leonard Mascal’s might be quoted: ‘“ Also for
Oxen to labour, the blacke Oxe and the redde
Oxe are best, and the browne or greezled Oxe
nexte: the white one is worst of all colours.”?
Among cows, “The browne colour mixt with
white spots is good, with the redde and the
blacke.”* Remembering that cattle were still
valued for draught rather than for milk or beef,
we cannot imagine that farmers would be ready
to set aside their red or their black cattle for either
the red-and-white or the white.

We have thus shown the cattle of the south
of England to have been red down to the

1 “ Booke of Cattell,” 1591.

44 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

eighteenth century. Remembering that before
that time cattle were seldom moved from one
part to another unless their owners carried them
along with them in their migrations, and re-
membering the history of England at the same
time, we may safely say that these cattle were
brought to England by the Anglo-Saxons. If
still further proof were required, we have only to
seta bull of any of the red south of England
horned breeds alongside a bull of any of the
North Germanic or Danish red Breeds.

V

THE NORSE CONTINGENT

Hap this volume been written a year ago, the
present and some of the following chapters would
have been written with less confidence than now.
Their titles might have been the same, but the
efforts of the chapters themselves to live up to
their titles might have been somewhat laboured.
The polled cattle, for instance, would have been
traced to the same origin as now, but the con-
firmatory evidence afforded by Mendelian re-
searches would have been lacking; and the
brindled cattle would have been traced to an
origin that would have been entirely wrong.

It is generally believed that the hornless
cattle of the British Islands have originated either
in reversions or sports which cropped up here
and there throughout the country in times gone
by. They are believed to have originated in
reversions or sports according as hornlessness
or hornedness is held to have been the older
condition. Darwin favoured the latter view:
“It is probable that some breeds, such as the
semi-monstrous niata cattle, and some peculiarities

45

46 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

such as being hornless, etc., have appeared
suddenly from what we may call a spontaneous
variation,” * and ‘No one can give any explana-
tion—although no doubt there must be a cause—
of the loss of horns, any more than of the loss
of hair, both losses strongly tending to be in-
herited. It is, I think, possible that the loss
of horns has occurred often since cattle were
domesticated, though I can call to mind only a
case in Paraguay about a century ago.”?

But neither theory will bear much inquiry,
for each presumes a phenomenon which has not
been seen within what might be called bovine
historical time to have been of frequent and
widespread occurrence in the earlier days of
legend and myth. It is true that many cattle
now hornless—and sheep, too, for that matter—
are descended from ancestors that were horned ;
but in those cases the horns were removed by
crossing with hornless breeds.

Whence, then, came our hornless cattle?
That question can only be answered after some
consideration of their history and distribution.
At the present time there are only three breeds
of hornless cattle in Britain ; but in the eighteenth
century there were hornless breeds in eight or
ten places round the coasts of England and

1 “ Animals and Plants under Domestication,” 1868, vol. i. p. 92.
2 Letter to Messrs. Macdonald and Sinclair, published in their
“ History of Polled Aberdeen or Angus Cattle,” 1882, p. 12.

THE NORSE CONTINGENT 47

Scotland and also in Ireland. It will be necessary
to marshal some part of what is known about
each of these breeds serzatem.

The Suffolk Duns.—Although Suffolk was
renowned for its dairy products four or five
centuries ago, we have no earlier description
of the Suffolk cow herself than one written in
1735. In 1586, Camden wrote that in Suffolk
“They also make vast numbers of cheese, which,
to the great advantage of the inhabitants, are
carried into all parts of England, nay, into
Germany also, with France and Spain, as Panteleon
Medicus has told us, who scruples not to compare
them with those of Placentia both in colour and
taste ;” * and Speed wrote: ‘‘ The commodities of
this Shire are many and great, whereof the
chiefest consist in Corn, in Cattle, Cloth, Pasturage,
Sea-Fish, and Fowle ; and as Abbo Floriescensis
hath depainted, Zhzs country ts of green and
passing fresh hue, pleasantly replenished with
Orchards, Gardens, and Groves: thus he de-
scribed it above six hundred years since, and
now we find as he hath said; to which we may
add their gain from the Pail;”? but John Kirby
in his “Suffolk Traveller,” published in 1735,
describes the cow herself as having ‘a clean
throat, with little dewlap, a snake head, thin
and short legs, the ribs springing well from the

1 Gibson’s edition, 1750, p. 437.
2 “Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain,” 1676, page 33.

48 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

centre of the back, the carcase large, the belly
heavy, the back-bone ridged, the chine thin and
hollow, the loin narrow, the udder square, large,
loose, and creased when empty, the milk veins
remarkably large and rising in knotted puffs;
and this so general, that I scarcely ever saw a
famous milker that did not possess this point,
a general habit of leanness, hip bones high and
ill covered, and scarcely any part of the carcase
so formed and covered as to please an eye
that is accustomed to fat beasts of the finer
breeds.”’ *

The colour of the Suffolk cattle may be
inferred from a communication of Sir Thomas
Beevor’s, published in the Bath Society’s “ Letters
and Papers:” ‘The cows you saw were bred
from the polled or horn-less Suffolk dun-coloured
cows (than which, for frvoft, though not for
beauty, 1 think, with the most intelligent Mr.
Young, there is not so valuable a breed in
England) by a Derbyshire black-and-white bull?
given me by my friend, Lord Townshend. This
mixture produced their uncommon colour of
mouse and white, as well as that shape and
make which pleased you, and is so much
esteemed by the best judges of cattle; their
heads and necks being small, their legs short,
carcases large and deep, and loins remarkably

1 Quoted from Youatt’s “ Cattle,” 1834, p. 174.
2 A horned breed.

ae

THE NORSE CONTINGENT 49

broad ; and being of greater weight in seemingly
less compass than any beasts I ever saw ; whether
from being without horns, from being constantly
kept in shedded yards or houses during the
winter, from their nature, or from these causes
altogether, they are so tame and docile, that
I never knew any mischief done by them to any
other animal.”* It has been shown recently”
that this mouse-coloured dun is the hybrid between
black and light dun, and we may infer, therefore,
that the colour of the Suffolk breed was light
dun. And this inference is confirmed by a
remark in Culley’s ‘‘ Observations on Live Stock”
that ‘the Suffolks are almost all light duns.” *

By Low’s time the Suffolks had extended to
‘“‘ Norfolk, Cambridge, and a part of Essex,” * but,
by crossing with red Norfolk cattle, many of
them had changed their colour to yellow, which
is the hybrid between red and light dun, and
some, by further crossing, had become red.
“The prevailing and the best colours are red,
red and white, brindled, and a yellowish cream
colour.”® Eventually the Suffolk and Norfolk
breeds amalgamated: the former giving up their
colour and the latter their horns.

The Northern or Yorkshire Polls.—Few of

1 Vol. iii., second edition, 1788, p. 280.

2 Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, vol. xii., No. 8,
“The Colours of Highland Cattle.”

3 Second edition, 1794, p. 66.

* “Domesticated Animals,” p. 322. ° “ Youatt,” 1834, p. 175.

E

s0 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

these cattle penetrated far inland. Tuke' informs
us that Henry Peirse, of Bedale, had a large
herd, and he publishes a representation of a —
“polled Teeswater cow” belonging to Richard
Raisen, Bishopthorpe; but their headquarters
were somewhere in the neighbourhood of Holder-
ness. It is doubtful, however, if their numbers
ever were large. Lawrence’ describes them as
having “the same qualities as the short-horned
cattle, carrying vast substance, and some I have
seen lately are of a great size, although in that
particular, they are most conveniently various.”
Strickland*® gives their colour: ‘This breed is
distinctly marked by its colour, being variously
blotched with large well-defined patches of deep
red or clear black, in some families of dun or
mouse-colour on a clean white ground; they are
never brindled or mixed, and rarely of one
uniform colour.”

Durham.—There is evidence of both yellow
and dun cattle in Durham in the eighteenth
century. Writing in 1821 about a well-known
Shorthorn cow which lived about 1777, Mr.
Thomas Hutchinson says she was “a large
yellow cow with some white. ... She might,
indeed, have been descended (for anything I
know to the contrary) from the old woman's

1 “ Agriculture of the North Riding of Yorkshire,” 1800.
2 “ General Treatise on Cattle,” etc., 1805, p. 71.
3 “ Agriculture of the East Riding of Yorkshire,” 1812.

THE NORSE CONTINGENT 51

propitious dun cow found at Durham (some time
back now), which directed the monks attending
the remains of St. Cuthbert to that seat of ease
and magnificence.” *

This legendary cow is of unusual interest.
Her reward was to have her effigy carved in
stone set up in one of the turrets of Durham
Cathedral about the year 1300. After the
Reformation she was the subject of the rhyme
that—

“The dun cow’s milk
Makes the prebend’s wife go in silk,”

which if it be not sufficient to prove that the
original cow herself was dun, is evidence that
some of her post-Reformation successors were of
that colour. That, however, is of small moment
compared with the possibility that the model of
the effigy may have been hornless, Having
become worn and effaced, a new effigy was put
up about 1778. The original, as will be seen from
the illustration below, which is a copy of Grimm’s
drawing as taken from Hutchinson’s “ History of
Durham,”? had no horns. But the Durham
people of 1778 had no idea that a Durham cow
could ever have been hornless. Weather and time
must have made the old cow polled, and the new
one therefore was carved to look a Shorthorn!

1 Quoted in Bates’s “ Thomas Bates and the Kirklevington

Shorthorns,” 1897, p. 45.
2 1785-1794, vol. ii. p. 226.

52 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

But, “the horns were made this time of lead, lest
she should ever again be reduced to the condition
of a polled beast.” ?

The Angus Doddies and the Buchan
fTumlies.—The hornless cattle of Forfarshire and
Aberdeenshire may be considered together be-
cause their histories are parallel, and because,

VILISYI 4 i

pssst

|

= =s

Duy

ed

i i

IM

THE DURHAM DUN COW.
[from Hutchinson’s “* History of Durham.”

although there are no definite records to the point,
there can be very little doubt but that they
are merely separate links in a chain of hornless
cattle that occupied the lands on the coast from
Forfarshire to Morayshire, if not farther. These
cattle are not mentioned by any writer till within
a few years of the close of the eighteenth century,

1 “Thomas Bates and the Kirklevington Shorthorns,” 1897,
p- 46.

THE NORSE CONTINGENT 53

and it is not likely they were known outside
their own territory a hundred years earlier. Early
in the eighteenth century there sprang up in
England a demand for hornless cattle which was
responded to first in Galloway, and considerably
later in the north-eastern counties. The
result was that breeders elected to breed from
hornless cattle; and hornlessness, which had
hitherto been practically confined to the country
near the coast, moved farther and farther inland.
By Youatt’s time (1834) the horned and the
hornless cattle were almost numerically equal in
the interior of the north-eastern counties, while
the hornless ones were still in the majority
on the coast. A quarter of a century later the
horns had been almost entirely removed from the
inland black cattle.

Unfortunately, we have no contemporary
description of the original east-coast hornless
cattle; but, from Youatt’s and other notes on
the colours of Forfarshire and Aberdeenshire
cattle, and from a description of Aberdeenshire
cattle, as they appeared about 1830, written
by an Aberdeenshire farmer for Messrs. Mac-
donald and Sinclair, their characters can be
inferred.

It must be remembered that, after the middle
of the eighteenth century, many large southern
cattle were introduced to the north-eastern
counties. At first, these were chiefly Fifeshire

54 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

cattle, with a smaller number of Longhorns and
Longhorn grades or crosses. Latterly, Short-
horns predominated. Consequently we must look
for variations in size as a result of crossing with
the imported stock. At the same time we must
look for several new colours in addition to the
original black. Mr. Forbes, the Aberdeenshire
farmer referred to, writes thus: ‘‘ The cattle in
‘Buchan’ about half a century ago and earlier
might be said to have consisted of horned and
polled black cattle in about equal proportions.
The polled cattle were of two classes, one large
and another small. I knew the small kind well.
They were rather puny creatures, always thin
in flesh, and very badly used. They were pre-
eminently the crofter’s cow, as they were able to
live through the winter on the straw of oats and
bere, and water, if necessary. Of the larger por-
tion of the cattle, about one-half were jet black,
excepting the udder, which was usually white.
They could not stand starvation so well as the
small polls, but with better treatment they gave
a heavier yield of milk. When creamed, how-
ever, their milk was thinner than that from the
small cows.” ?

As to the colours of the Forfarshire polled
cattle, Youatt writes: ‘“‘ The greater part of them
are black, or with a few white spots. The next

1 That is, East Aberdeenshire.
2 “ History of Polled Aberdeen or Angus Cattle,” p, 72.

THE NORSE CONTINGENT 55

general colour is yellow, comprehending the
brindled, dark red and silver-coloured yellow.” '
Among Forfarshire horned cattle ‘the prevailing
colour is black, but with more admixture of other
tints: some have white spots on the forehead,
and white on the flanks and belly. There are
more brindled cattle than in Aberdeen ; some are
dark red, and others of a silver yellow or dun.
A few are black with white hairs intermixed;
and occasionally a beast is seen that is altogether
white, with the exception of a few black hairs
about the head.”? Youatt makes no kind of
reference to the Aberdeenshire polled cattle, but
of the horned ones he writes, “The colour is
usually black, but sometimes brindled.”* Mac-
donald and Sinclair tell us that ‘“‘ Formerly, both
in Angus and Aberdeen, the breed* embraced a
variety of colours as well as difference in size,
Black, with some white spots on the underline,
was the prevailing colour. Some were brindled—
dark red and black stripes alternately ; others
were red; others brown; and a few what
Youatt called ‘silver-coloured yellow.’”*® An
early nineteenth-century Banffshire writer tells
us that, with the dealers who came to Rathven
for cattle, ‘‘The favourite colour is pure black.
The brindled ranks next in esteem, and the

1 “Cattle,” p. 167. 2 Ibid., p. 114.
8 Ibid., p. 106. * Ze. the polled breed.
§ “ Polled Aberdeen and Angus Cattle,” p. 76.

56 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

dun is not disliked. Pure white or streaked are
counted inferior.” *

Here, in a few words, we have the early
history of the modern Aberdeen-Angus breed.
Scarcely had the inland horned black cattle begun
to unite with the hornless coast cattle when they
resolved to take in partners from the south. In
course of time the amalgamation resulted in a
breed with characters derived from several sources :
blackness from the native horned cattle, hornless-
ness from the coast cattle, and size from the cattle
from the south. Some of the characters brought
in, and other characters which appeared during
the process, were eventually eliminated. Here
we are only concerned with the colours. We
know those of the native horned cattle and of the
cattle brought in from the south, and we also
know the new colours that could have arisen
from the mixing of these. Altogether they were :
black from the native and the Fifeshire cattle;
red, brindled, and white marks above and below
from the Longhorns and their crosses; and red,
red and white, roan, white, and blue roan from
the Shorthorns. Brown was, perhaps, in the
country before the southern cattle came in. If
not, it came in with the Longhorns. But other
colours are reported to have appeared by Youatt
and the other writers quoted. There are yellow,

1 “Transactions of the Highland and Agricultural Society of
Scotland for 1906,” p. 204.

THE NORSE CONTINGENT $7

“ silver-coloured yellow,” and dun: colours which
could not have arisen otherwise than by contact
with light dun cattle. That being so, there
can be no other conclusion than that the colour
of the east-coast partners was light dun. It
could also be shown, although there is no need
here, that some of the characters Mr. Forbes
referred to, such as small, puny, thin-fleshed, and
producers of rich milk, came originally from the
hornless cattle, which, upon the whole, turn out
to have been wonderfully like the Suffolks.

The Sutherland Polls.—The Sutherland polled
cattle are long extinct, and it is only from an
almost casual remark of Pennant’s that we know
they ever existed. ‘Sutherland is a country
abounding in cattle, and sends out annually 2500
head, which sold about this time (lean) from
42 10s. to £3 per head. These are frequently
without horns, and both they and the horses
are very small.”* According to Youatt, the
native cattle of Sutherland were very small:
“much smaller than those of Caithness.” ?
Their colour is not mentioned, but a corre-
spondent of Youatt’s wrote him that the cattle
in the neighbouring county, Ross, “are of all
colours, but black and brindled predominate.” *

The Skye Polls.—We know that at one time
there were polled cattle in Skye just as we know

? “Tour in Scotland,” third edition, 1774, vol. i. p. 170.
2 “ Cattle,” p. 93. 3 Tbid., p. 97.

58 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

there were polled cattle in Sutherland: only this
time our authority is none less than Dr. Samuel
Johnson himself, who made his famous tour to
the Highlands in 1773: “The cattle of Sky
are not so small as is commonly believed. .. .
Of their black cattle some are without horns,
called by the Scots huméle cows, as we call a bee
an humble bee, that wants a sting. Whether
the difference be specifick, or accidental, though
we inquired with great diligence, we could not
be informed. We are not very sure that the
bull is ever without horns,’ though we have been
told that such bulls there are. What is produced
by putting a horned and an unhorned male and
female together, no man has ever tried that
thought the result worthy of observation.”? The
colour of the cattle in Skye in Johnson’s time
is not recorded, but dun and yellow; the colours
produced by crossing black and red with light
dun are common among Highland cattle; and
light dun itself is not unusual. At the present
day, light dun and dun occur more frequently
among the Highlanders of Skye and the neigh-
bouring islands than among those of the main-
land; and an inspection of the foundation entries
in the “ Highland Herd Book” indicates that at
one time these colours were of more frequent

2 Just as the Aberdeenshire men, who desired hornless calves,
used hornless bulls, the Skye men, who desired horned calves, used

horned bulls.
2 Johnson’s “Collected Works,” Dublin, 1793, vol. iv. p. 479.

THE NORSE CONTINGENT 59

occurrence than now. MacGillivray, in his
° Report on the Present State of the Outer
Hebrides,” published in 1834, writes that ‘“ the
common colours are black, red, brown or bran-
dered, that is a mixture of red and brown in
stripes—brindled. A whitish dun’ colour is also
pretty frequently seen.” *

The Galloways.—The history of the Galloways
is very similar to that of the Aberdeen-Angus,
excepting that they felt and responded sooner
to the English demand for hornless cattle. There
is no description of the original hornless cattle of
Galloway, but the presence of dun among their
descendants, even down to the present day,
connects them with the other hornless cattle
round the British coasts. According to Youatt,
the majority of the cattle in Galloway were
horned in the middle of the eighteenth century ;
but in Culley’s time the horned ones were
extinct : the Galloways’ ‘‘ most essential difference
from every other breed is in having no horns at
all.”* In this respect they were at least half a
century ahead of the Aberdeen-Angus.

The Devon Natts.—The hornless Devon
cattle have been extinct for about a century ; and,
although there are several references to them,
there is no full description. Their territory was

1 That is apparently what is now called light dun.
® “ Prize Essays and Transactions of the Highland Society.”
* “Observations upon Live Stock,” second edition, 1794, p. 69.

60 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

about Barnstaple on the north coast : the district in
which the modern North Devon breed originated.
The polled Devons were described to Lawrence
as ‘coloured, middle-sized, thick-set, and apt to
make fat, but coarser than the true-bred Devon.”
Their colour is not recorded, but, in the “ Annals
of Agriculture” for 1792, a writer called Treby
mentions both yellow and hornless cattle in
South Devon.?

The Somerset Polls.—These are also extinct.
Low wrote of them: ‘The Sheeted Breed of
Somerset ... has existed in the same parts of
of England from time immemorial. The red
colour of the hair has a slight yellow tinge, and
the white colour passes like a sheet over the
body. The individuals are sometimes horned,
but more frequently they are hornless.”* There
is a portrait of two sheeted Somerset cows, a
horned and a hornless, in the Low collection of
paintings in Edinburgh University.

The Irish Maoiles.—Hornless cattle of the old
Irish race are found here and there chiefly in
the west and in the north: from the level of
Roscommon to Donegal and Antrim. Their
numbers are now small, and there being no

1 “ General Treatise on Cattle,” etc., 1805, p. 71.

2 The presence of these hornless cattle at Barnstaple raises
several unusually interesting questions, viz. Did they impart their
shortness of leg to the North Devon breed, and did the short legs
of the Dexter which came from Devon cattle come originally from
Scandinavians?

8 “ Domesticated Animals,” p. 350.

THE NORSE CONTINGENT 61

systematic attempt to breed them pure unless
by a very few owners of small herds, their extinc-
tion seems only a matter of not very many years.
At the present day the Irish Maoiles are generally
full-sized cattle. There are many colours among
them, viz. black, red, brindled, flecked, yellow,
and dun. Yellow is generally held to be the
proper colour. Here again we get back to light
dun, the original colour of all the other hornless
breeds; and one of the breeders writes that he
once owned a “steel gray Mulline.” The Irish
Maoiles have also some other characters common
to some of the other breeds. They are usually
good milkers, and are sought after on this
account; many of them give very rich milk;
they are often short-legged, big bodied, narrow
backed, with sickle-shaped hocks that brush each
other at every step.

Looking back again at these descriptions of
the hornless British breeds, there can be no other
conclusion than that they did not originate in
separate and independent reversions or variations,
but that they were all descended from the same
race, which was entirely different from the others
in Britain. It was hornless, of course, it was
light dun in colour, and small in size; it hada
long “snake” head, narrow chine and loins, a
deep body, short thin legs, sickle-shaped hocks,
and it gave a good yield of milk richer than usual.

The fact that the hornless breeds were located

62 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

in maritime districts, and that these lay right in
the tracks of the Norsemen, immediately suggests
that the hornless race was of Scandinavian origin.
In support of this suggestion it can be shown
that the hornless cattle came to Britain at the
same time as the Norsemen, that similar cattle
were taken to other places where the Norsemen
settled, and that the same race still exists in
Europe from Norway to Northern Russia.
Although the hornless breeds are not men-
tioned by any writer till the eighteenth century,
they were in Britain long before that time. In
a legal document, dated 1523—“ Instrumentum
sasine in favorem Johannis Cumying ”— it is re-
corded that the lands of Culter in Aberdeenshire
passed from one man’s possession to another’s
by the new owner receiving not the usual token,
a handful of earth and a stone, but “unum bovem
nigrum hommyll appretiatum ad quadragintas
solidos et octo denarios monete Scotie :” —a black
hummle, z.c. humble, z.e. hornless ox, valued at
40s. 8d. Scots. The Norsemen themselves have
left evidence of the existence of hornless cattle in
the North East of Scotland in their own time.
It consists of a number of stone slabs bearing
chiselled-out figures of bulls dug up on the shores
of the Moray Firth chiefly at Burghead, in Moray-
shire, which was a Norse or Danish stronghold.

1 The Spalding Club’s “ Collections for a History of the Shires
of Aberdeen and Banff,” vol. iii. p. 344.

THE ‘NORSE CONTINGENT 63

The figures show two kinds of bulls, a horned
and a hornless. The following illustrations of

BURGHEAD BULLS.
[From * The Sculptured Stones of Scotland.”

them are copied from ‘‘ The Sculptured Stones of
Scotland.”! And there is evidence of hornless
cattle in Ireland as early
as the ninth or the
tenth century. In a
crannoge near Dun-
shaughlin, about seven-
teen miles north-west
of Dublin, a consider-
able number of hornless
and other skulls was
unearthed in the middle
of last century. Some
of these are now in the
National Museum in HORNLESS SKULL, FROM THE

fi DUNSHAUGHLIN CRANNOGE.
Dublin, and one of them [Drawn from a specimen in the

a figure Cy ae i. Dublin National Museum.
William Wilde was able to fix the crannoge’s
range of date at from 848 to 933 A.D.

1 Vol. ii., Plate 23.

64 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

But these facts, although they are suggestive,
do not necessarily confine the arrival of the
hornless cattle to the times of the Norse invasions.
That, however, can be done by other considera-
tions. By their geographical position, wedged
in, as it were, between the red Anglo-Saxon
cattle and the sea, the arrival of the Suffolk
breed cannot be placed earlier than the very
end of the Anglo-Saxon invasion. The same
might also be said about the Devon and Yorkshire
polls. And the fact that archzologists, although
they have found other skulls, have failed to find
hornless skulls either of Roman or Anglo-Saxon
date in East Anglia or any other hornless district,
points to the same conclusion.

The latest date for the arrival of the hornless
cattle in Britain can also be fixed. It is some-
where before the Norman Conquest. In previous
chapters of this book it was shown that there
was no general migration of cattle to Britain
from Anglo-Saxon times till the Dutch impor-
tations of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies, and that these were horned, not hornless
cattle. It was also shown that, in earlier times
at any rate, cattle migrations were coincident
upon the migrations of their owners. The
only two sets of men who could have brought
in the hornless cattle were therefore the Norse-
men and the Normans. The latter we know
to have consisted entirely of the nobility and

THE NORSE CONTINGENT 65

their military followers, who, when they had
ousted the English landlords, put themselves in
their stead, and therefore had no need to bring
over cattle from their Norman lands. Besides,
the hornless cattle were found chiefly in parts
of Scotland and Ireland where the Normans
did not penetrate. We are therefore driven to
the conclusion that the importers of the hornless
cattle were the Norsemen. But, if further proof
were required, there are still the facts that cattle
of the same race were taken to other Norse
settlements, and that others still remain in
Norway. These cattle may be identified, not
only by their hornlessness but also by their
colour, size, and shape. In most places, some
of their original characters have been lost by
crossing with other cattle. But if, in likely
places, we find cattle bearing some of the original
Norse characters, the presumption that they are
of Norse descent is clear: more especially as
some of the original characters were peculiar to
the Norse cattle only. Thus the cattle of the
Channel Islands can be identified as of the same
race by the presence of light dun—called silver
grey and so on—and yellow; by their shapes ;
and also by the quality of their milk. There
are still dun-coloured cattle in Orkney and
Shetland, and fifty years ago there were many
more, especially in Shetland. Low was absolutely
clear that they were of Scandinavian origin, after
F

66 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

having fully compared them with the cattle of
Norway. The cattle of Iceland, which are
undoubtedly Norse, were thus described by Uno —
von Triol in 1780: ‘‘ Their beeves are not large,
but very fat and good. It has been reported by
some, though without foundation, that there are
none without horns: it is true, however, that
they seldom have any.”* It might also be
remarked that the old Caithness cattle bore
some of the characters of the hornless cattle:
“The chest was small, and the ribs flat, and
the back thin; there was not room for the back
to beat, nor the lungs to play.” ?

Perhaps a still more striking link is the recent
discovery in some earthen mounds in North
Holland of skulls similar to those found in
Ireland. In dealing with these skulls in Cultura
for 1908, the magazine of the old students of the
Royal Agricultural College, at Wageningen,
Professor Broekema points out that some Scandi-
navian bracelets and cloak-pins were found in
the same mounds.

There are small bunches of hornless cattle
here and there in other parts of Europe; but,
according to Wilckens,® “they are found chiefly
in Northern Europe, in North Russia, Finnland,
Lappland, Sweden, Jemtland, Norway and

1 “Letters from Iceland,” 1780, p. 132.
2 Youatt’s “ Cattle,” p. 88.
3 “ Grundziige der Naturgeschichte der Haustiere,” p. 308.

THE NORSE CONTINGENT 67

Iceland.” Mittendorff,’ maintains that they are
the lineal descendants of the hornless cattle of
the Ancient Scythians, mentioned by Herodotus,
and that they wandered north from the south
of modern Russia, and then westwards into
Scandinavia. If this be so, then it may be
possible some day to trace them still farther
back either into Asia or to the hornless cattle of
the early Egyptians. For the present, however,
we are concerned with them in Scandinavia, and
two quotations will be sufficient to show that the
hornless race makes itself manifest there precisely
as it has done in Britian. The first quotation is
from a letter received from Professor Isaachsen
of Aas, in Norway: “As to our cattle up to the
year 1600, we know very little. But in these
days, like in ours, there were several distinct
breeds in our country, and probably they have
not changed their characteristics very much.
Especially in the western and south-western
parts of Norway, the so-called ‘ Westland,’ from
which part of the country the first settlers are
supposed to have come to your country, the
breed is partly horned, partly polled, about half
the animals being polled, I think. The colour
of the breed is either black, dun, red, or grey,
whole-coloured or with small or large white
marks or spots. In the south-eastern parts of

1 See Landwirtschaftliche Jahrbiicher, vol. xvii., 1888, pp.
299, 300.

68 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

Norway, especially in Akershus and Smaalenene,
the indigenous breed is constantly red and polled.
In Esterdalen and Gudbrandsdalen, the two ©
large eastern valleys of the country, the native
breed is black or dun, in some cases red, most of
the individuals being horned: only a few are
polled. The breed in the western parts of
Norway we suppose to be the most ancient, or
one of the most ancient, in our country.”

The other quotation, and the following
illustration of a cow of the Swedish fell or
mountain (Fjall) race are taken from Sundbirg’s
“Sweden, its Population and its Industries,”
published in 1904. ‘The History of the cattle
in our country presents a good many vicissitudes.
The Law of Uppland, a.p. 1296, describes
Swedish cattle as being small, hornless, white
or whitish grey, often with dark spots. The
Alpine breed in Northern Sweden is so still, a
race we have every reason to consider as being
the oldest in the country.”

There is some doubt as to whether the
colour here called ‘whitish grey” is the same
as our light dun. Samples of hair which have
been procured through the kindness of several
correspondents in Sweden are some white and
some light dun.

It ought to be mentioned that several of the
British “‘ wild” white herds are, or were, hornless.
Their unfailing white colour suggests, however,

THE NORSE CONTINGENT 69

that they are not of the Norse race, and the
recent discovery of hornless skulls at Newstead,
an old Roman centre in Berwickshire, and

SWEDISH FJALL COW.
[from Sundbarg’s “* Sweden.”

referred to by Professor Cossar Ewart in the
article “Cattle” in the Standard Cyclopedia of
Agriculture, points to their having come from the
south of Europe with the Romans,

VI

THE DUTCH INVASION

ALTHOUGH it was not till the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries that what we might call the
‘Dutch Invasion” took place, the tracks of the
cattle brought in from the Low Countries at that
time are only a little clearer than those of the
Scandinavian cattle that came across the North
Sea seven or eight hundred years before. One
reason for this is that there was no great human
migration to correspond; while another is that,
misled by the great change the Dutch cattle
induced upon the cattle of Britain, we look for
the importations of enormous numbers: forgetting
that such are not required if the imported animals
and their progeny were thought much more
worthy than those whose territory they invaded.
The recent increase of Shorthorns and Herefords
outside Britain might be quoted as cases in
point.

In Britain there were incentives to the impor-
tation of foreign stock that had never existed
before. During the sixteenth century, through
political and other interests, England was drawn

70

THE DUTCH INVASION 71

further and further away from France and Spain,
and closer and closer to Holland and Northern
Germany. Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558 ;
and the Netherlands revolted against Spain in
1572.

“Volunteers stole across the channel in in-
creasing numbers to the aid of the Dutch, till the
five hundred Englishmen who fought in the
beginning of the struggle rose to a brigade of five
thousand, whose bravery turned one of the most
critical battles of the war.’ In 1585 “Lord
Leicester was hurried to the Flemish Coast with
8000 men.” ?

Englishmen renewed their acquaintance with
Holland and Western Germany during the Thirty
Years’ War, begun in 1618; while during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, persecuted
Flemings and Huguenots came flocking to
Britain.

Before their revolt, the Low Countries had long
been in advance of the rest of Europe in agricul-
ture and industry and, after the emancipation of
Holland, this advance was far more than main-
tained, not only in Holland, but also in the
neighbouring States still under the rule of Spain.

Dutch and other foreign agricultural books
were translated into English, and English writers

1 J. R. Green’s “Short History of the English People,” illus-
trated edition, p. 828,

2 Ibid., p. 832.

72 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

described continental crops and farming methods.
Leonard Mascal, who is asserted to have intro-
duced pippin apples and carp, and who had
travelled on the Continent, published’ ‘‘ A Booke
of the Arte and manner, how to plant and graffe
all sortes of Trees by one of the Abbey of St.
Vincent in France, with an addition of certain
Dutch practices,” in 1572, “The Husbandrie,
ordering and Government of Poultrie,” in 1581,
and ‘*The Government of Cattel,” in 1596,
Heresbachius’s ‘“‘Foure Books of Husbandry,
Newely Englished, and increased by Barnabe
Googe,” was published in 1577; Sir Hugh Plat’s
‘Jewel House of Art and Nature,” in which a
great knowledge of the Low Countries is shown,
was published in 1594; Bishop Dubravius'’s (of
Olmutz) “ New Booke of Good Husbandry,” was
published in English in 1599; Sir Cornelius
Vermuiden, a Dutchman, published his ‘ Dis-
courses touching the Drayning of the Great
Fenns,” in 1642; and Hartlib published Sir
Richard Weston’s “‘ Discourse of Husbandry used
in Brabant and Flanders,” in 1645, ‘‘ The Legacy ;
or, an Enlargement of the Discourse,” in 1651,
and the “ Appendix to the Legacy,” in the same
year.

Thus, through books and returning soldiers
and travellers, a knowledge of the agriculture of
the Low Countries was filtering through to English

1 McDonald’s “ Agricultural Writers,” 1908, p. 42.

THE DUTCH INVASION 73

farmers just at the time when it was likely to
have fullest effect. The feudal system, and the
cast-iron method of agriculture by which it was
accompanied, had already begun to break down.
The village, with its three fields and its three-
course rotation of wheat’ the first year; beans,
peas, or other grain the second ; and fallow the
third, still prevailed, but rents were now usually
paid in money instead of in service and kind.
Landowners had become business men rather
than feudal chiefs, and, in consequence, much of
the land that had formerly been forest and waste
was parcelled out in large blocks to be farmed by
the landowners themselves or rented to farmers.
Fields were enclosed both for tillage and grazing,
and the economy of this system over the old
“mingle-mangle ” of the village system, both as
regards crops and stock, was soon realised.
Formerly, no man could adopt new crops or a
new rotation, because his fellow-villagers and the
three-field system were both against it ; formerly,
no man could improve his stock unless the rest
of the villagers did the same, because the male
breeding animals were used in common, and the
female stock must all be grazed together. Now
the “champaign” farmer could grow the crops
that brought most profit, adopt an independent
rotation, and select and improve his live stock as
he had a mind.

Thus, many British farmers were free to take

74 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

advantage of the example and advance of the
Low Countries. The change could not come all
at once, however, but it was begun about 1644
through the introduction of turnips and red clover
to Kent by Sir Richard Weston, who had been
educated in the Low Countries, and who, in later
life, passed some years of exile there ;* and it was
accelerated by the work of Jethro Tull and Lord
Townshend early in the following century. And
just as better crops and better farming were
introduced by Sir Richard Weston and others, so
also were better stock imported by proprietors and
farmers who wished to improve their own and the
cattle of the country.

It will be noticed that, so far, the original
British cattle and all the intruding races were
whole coloured: the Celtic cattle were black, the
Roman white, the Anglo-Saxon red, and the
Scandinavian light dun. The cattle now to be
imported were chiefly of broken colours. The
date of their first arrival cannot now be fixed, but
the will of John Percy, of Haram, near Helmsley,
in Yorkshire, suggests that it may have been as
early as 1400: “ To my son John I bequeath two
stots with short horns; to John Webster a small
horned stot; to John Belby a cow with a white
leske ; to my son a heifer with a white head.””

1 “ Dictionary of National Biography.”
2 Bates’s “ Thomas Bates and the Kirklevington Shorthorns,”
1897, p. 23.

THE DUTCH INVASION 75

But, if John Percy’s white-headed heifer was
descended from imported cattle, the importations
must either have been very few, or in poor
demand, for there is no indication that the York-
shire cattle, unless those in the parks and their
tame cousins in the possession of one or two
families, were otherwise than black till three
centuries later. Besides, it was in Lincolnshire,
to which Dutchmen came to drain the fens, that
the Dutch cattle are first reported to have gained
a footing. In 1683 Gervaise Markham writes * :
“As touching the right Breed of Kine through
our Nation, it generally affordeth very good ones,
yet some Countries do far exceed other Countries,
as Cheshire, Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Derby-
shire, for black Kine; Gloucestershire, Somer-
setshire, and some part of Wiltshire for red Kine ;
and Lincolnshire for pide Kine.”

Thirty-three years later Mortimer? tells us
where these Lincolnshire cattle had come from,
and also that cattle of the same kind had been
imported to Kent: “But the best sort of Cows
for the Pail, only that they are tender and need
very good keeping, are the long-legg’d, short-
horn’d Cow of the Dutch-breed, which is to be
had in some places of Lincolnshire, but most used
in Kent.”

Still another forty years later, Hale® refers to

1 “The English House-Wife.”
2 “The Whole Art of Husbandry,” 1716, p. 227.
3 “Compleat Body of Husbandry,” vol. iii. p. 35.

76 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

the same race of cattle several times, and shows
that the native and imported races had already
begun to mix: “The Yorkshire oxen are, in
general, black all over, and they are very large,
firm, and valuable Kind in every respect. There
are none that exceed them for Labour and few
feed like them. The Oxen of Staffordshire, and
many of the neighbouring Counties, are also of this
kind. The Oxen of Lincolnshire are in general
red-and-white: they are very bulky, and equal to
any in Value. The Oxen of Somersetshire, and
some of the adjoining Counties, are naturally red.
They are also a very fine, large, and valuable
Breed. . . . The reader is not to suppose from
what is here said, that all the Oxen of Yorkshire
are black, all those of Gloucestershire and Somer-
setshire, red; or all the Lincolnshire oxen pyed.
These are the genuine and proper breed of each
of those several Counties, but the graziers have
mixed them more or less in each County.”

Again, “The Welch and Scotch Cows will
do upon the poorest Pastures, They will suit
some who cannot rise to the better kinds...
but the fine Kinds are the Dutch and Alderney
cows, these are very like one another in Shape,
and in their Goodness, but the Alderney Cow is
preferable, because she is hardier.

‘The fine Dutch Breed have long legs, short
Horns, and a full Body. They are to be had in
Kent and Sussex, and some other Places where

THE DUTCH INVASION 77

they are still carefully kept up without Mixture
in Colour, and where they will yield two gallons
at a milking; but in order to this they require
great Attendance, and the best of Food. The
Alderney cow is like the Dutch in the Shortness
of her Horns, but she is somewhat stronger built,
and is not quite so tender.”

One more extract will bring us down to com-
paratively recent times, and will show how the
Dutch cattle continued to be imported, and how
their territory in the east of England extended.
It is from “Observations on Live Stock,” first
published in 1786, by George Culley, a Durham
man, who was first a pupil with Bakewell and
afterwards a farmer in Northumberland.

Of “the shorthorned or Dutcu kind,” Culley
writes: “Their colours are much varied; but
the generality are red-and-white mixed, or what
the breeders call flecked; and, when properly
mixed, is a very agreeable colour.

“There are many reasons for thinking this
breed has been imported from the Continent—
First, because they are still in many places called
the Dutch breed. Secondly, because we find very
few of these cattle any where in this island, except
along the eastern coast, facing those parts of
the Continent where the same kind of cattle are
still bred, and reaching from the southern ex-
tremity of Lincolnshire to the borders of Scotland.
The longhorns and these have met upon the

78 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

mountains which separate Yorkshire from Lanca-
shire, etc., and, by crossing, have produced a
mixed breed called the Half longhorns ; a very
heavy, strong, and not unuseful kind of cattle;
but we do not find that the one kind have spread
further West, or the others further East. But,
thirdly, I remember’ a gentleman of the county
of Durham (Mr. Michael Dobinson), who went
in the early part of his life into Holland in order
to buy bulls; those he bought were of much
service in improving the breed; and this Mr.
Dobinson and neighbours, even in my day, were
noted for having the best breed of short-horned
cattle, and sold their bulls and heifers for great
prices.

‘But afterwards, some other persons of less
knowledge going over, brought home some bulls,
that in all probability introduced along that coast
the disagreeable kind of cattle, well known to
breeders adjoining the river Tees, by the appella-
tion of lyery, or double-lyered; that is, black-
fleshed... .

“The breed, like most others, is better and
worse in different districts ; not so much, I appre-
hend, from the good or bad quality of the land,
as from a want of attention in the breeders. In
Lincolnshire (which is the farthest south that
we meet with any number of this kind of cattle)

1 Culley was born in 1730. See Sinclair’s “ History of Short-
horn Cattle,” p. 17.

THE DUTCH INVASION 79

they are, in general, more subject to lyer or black
flesh, than those bred farther North; and in that
rich part of Yorkshire called Holderness, they
are much the same as those south of the Humber,
of which we have been speaking. It is probable
that they had either stuck more to the lyery
black-beefed kind, than their more northern
neighbours, at that unfortunate period when
they were imported from the Continent, or that
the latter had seen their error. But from what-
ever cause this happened, it is a fact, that as
soon as we cross the Yorkshire Wolds, north-
ward, we find this breed alter for the better ; they
become finer in the bone, in the carcase, and, in a
great measure, free from that disagreeable lyery
sort which has brought such an odium upon this,
perhaps, most valuable breed. When you reach
that fine country on both sides of the River Tees,
you are then in the centre of this breed of cattle ;
a country that has been long eminent for good
stock of all kinds; the country where the
Dobinsons first raised a spirit of emulation
amongst the breeders, which is still kept up
by Mr. Hill, the Mr. Charges, the Mr. Collins,
Mr. Maynard, etc.” *

It is unnecessary to make more or later quota-
tions to show that these east-country English
cattle came from the opposite shores of the
German Ocean. Documentary evidence as to

Quoted from the second edition, 1794, p. 4o.

80 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

their progress farther westward is unusually
scanty. Indeed, were it not that the cattle them-
selves carried evidence of their origin wherever
they went, their westward march in England
might still remain not proven. But, early in the
eighteenth century, characters appear among the
cattle in some of the midland counties and in
the west and north-west which were previously
unknown in those parts of England, but were
well known in Holland and Flanders. These
are increase in size and the markings which are
still peculiar to the Herefords and the Long-
horns. These two breeds and the Shorthorns
were almost the only large cattle in Britain till
the nineteenth century was well through.

Hale tells us that, in his day, 1757, the
graziers had already mixed the breeds “ more or
less in each country,” while Culley’s remark that
‘‘a very heavy strong” breed had been raised
“upon the mountains which separate Yorkshire
from Lancashire ” by crossing the Yorkshire and
Lancashire cattle is in itself evidence that the
large West European cattle had reached Lanca-
shire long before Culley’s time. Still better
evidence is to be found in some of the old
“ Agricultural Surveys,” in which the authors, not
knowing of the banishment of the older cattle,
speak of these great cattle that were Flemish or
Dutch in appearance, size, and markings as
“native,” “indigenous,” and so on. In Pitt's

. SS

Ni A Sh ech ig ties Nt DS ag IE Cone ca ss ng

THE DUTCH INVASION 81

“Survey of Staffordshire,” for instance, some
enormous cattle with white faces and white backs
and under-lines, are figured as old Staffordshire
cattle. But perhaps the most valuable statement
of all is that to be found about Lord Scudamore
in Cooke’s continuation to Duncumb’s “ Collec-
tions towards the History and Antiquities of the
County of Hereford.” Scudamore, whose family
had been famous for generations for their horse-
manship and breed of horses,’ was a friend of
George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, and, when
the latter was assassinated in 1628, retired to his
estate at Holme Lacy and devoted himself to
agricultural improvements. His retirement was
twice interrupted, first in 1634 by his becoming
Ambassador in Paris for four years, and again
in 1643 by his being imprisoned for three years
for rebellion. He is credited with having intro-
duced the red-streak apple, and so turned Here-
ford into a county of orchards and cider; and
also with having introduced the cattle from which
the present Herefords are descended. Cooke’s
statement is as follows: “‘ Francis Hereford, son of
Roger Hereford, a merchant of Dunkirk, married
in the Netherlands and left several children.
Roger Hereford, a younger son, also a merchant
at Dunkirk, becoming a naturalised subject, was
on three occasions chief magistrate of that city.
These gentlemen are traditionally credited with
1 See “ Dictionary of National Biography.”
G

82 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

having procured in Flanders, for Lord Scuda-
more, the cattle from which the celebrated herds
of the county are descended.”* It is a pity this
statement conveys no information which would
indicate how far Lord Scudamore’s cattle were
responsible for the markings of the modern Here-
fords, or for those of the finch-backed cattle that
were once so numerous in their neighbourhood.
It would also be interesting to know the route
by which Lord Scudamore’s cattle were sent from
Flanders.

! Cooke, p. 73-

VII
THE FOUNDLINGS

So far we have dealt with the different races of
cattle that have come to Britain according to
the order of their arrival. Now we have to deal
with a race whose presence in Britain is a
puzzle; for not only must we confess ignorance
as to the date of its arrival, but even doubt as
to whether it ever arrived at all. At the present
day, animals of this race have an unpleasant
habit of turning up unasked in several breeds,
most notably among Highlanders and Longhorns.
Among Highlanders these unwelcome visitors
are almost black in colour with a brownish stripe
along the back and a ring of similar colour round
the muzzle. They are seldom retained for breed-
ing purposes, unless they are unusually good
heifers: in which cases they are registered as
some shade of brown—in Gaelic donn—sometimes
as a brindle.

In former times there were far more of these
blackish-brown cattle in the Highlands than now:
Indeed, early in the nineteenth century they were
found wherever the old Celtic black cattle were

83

84 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

found in Scotland, the north of England, Wales,
and Ireland—but, since the establishment of pure
breeds, and perhaps before that, they have
gradually disappeared : the Highland breed being
the last of the Celtic breeds to give them a
lodging. There are still a few among the non-
pedigreed Irish black cattle, but very few in
the territories of the Welsh, the Galloways, or
the Aberdeen-Angus.

Being registered among Highlanders, it is
among them we must first look for the link that
may connect these cattle with other breeds and
perhaps with the race to which they belong; and
an examination of the Highland Herd-Book
shows that the Highland brindles have been
produced by crossing this blackish-brown race
with the other three fundamental colours belong-
ing to the breed, viz. black, red, and light dun
(sometimes in other breeds described by such
words as “grey” and “silver grey ”’).

Is there any other British breed of cattle
in which brindles are known, and, if so, what
is their origin? There is one breed, the Long-
horns, and the Longhorn brindles also revert
back to a similar ancestral race, which is de-
scribed, however, not as brown or doum, but as
mulberry or plum coloured. Are there any
other cattle in which these same phenomena
can be traced? There is one other breed, almost
at Britain’s doors, in which this same brown, or

THE FOUNDLINGS 85

plum, or mulberry colour is quite common, namely,
the Jersey; and when the Jersey cattle of this
colour are crossed with red or black cattle, the
brindles of the Longhorns and Highlanders are
produced, And from Jersey it is but a step
to France and another to Switzerland for cattle
of the same colour.

These four sets of cattle—the Highlanders,
Longhorns, Jerseys, and Swiss—being thus con-
nected, the question next arising is, when and
how did these blackish-brown cattle come to
Britain? There is no clear mention of them till
about a hundred years ago; but even then they
were numerous. During the eighteenth century
the cattle by which it was most sought to improve
all others were the Longhorns. They were carried
in great numbers to Ireland, to other parts of
England and Wales, to Scotland, and even to
the Orkneys. Many of them, as we know, were
brindled, and when their brindled descendants
were bred together the ancestral blackish-brown
was bound to appear. Hence the suggestion in
the beginning of this chapter that we do not
know that the blackish-brown cattle themselves
came to Britain. Their parents may have come.

But where did the Longhorns get their brindled
colour? They originated in that part of England

1 Cross-breds between Sussex and Devon bulls and Jersey
cows almost invariably come brindle. C, J. Davies in Live
Stock Fournal, January 1, 1909.

86 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

where the Celtic, the Roman, the Anglo-Saxon,
and the Dutch races met. The Roman and
the Anglo-Saxon races were white and red
respectively. There remain only the Dutch and
the Celtic. But the authorities we have quoted
are all so emphatic that the cattle imported from
the Low Countries were red and white, pied, not
brindled, that the Dutch must also be absolved.
There is but one weak spot in their defence, and
that is a small one. The Low Countries, and
some parts of France—say Normandy—were
neither so far apart nor so definitely separated
in an Englishman’s mind, but that some of the
cattle imported as from the Low Countries may
have come from France. In this connection the
“lyery” fleshed cattle referred to by George
Culley must not be forgotten.

But, if the defence of the Dutch cannot be
penetrated, then the blame lies with the Celtic
cattle, and the Longhorns acquired their brindled
colour from the blackish-brown cattle that were
hiding, as it were, among the Celtic black ones.
That being so, how long had this hiding con-
tinued? The answer to this question is the
answer to the further question: which of these
two races, the real black or the pseudo-black,
arrived first in Britain? To that we can as yet
give no answer. We can only suggest, since
the pure black cattle in Britain were far more
numerous than the brownish-black, since brownish-

THE FOUNDLINGS 87

black cattle are also found in Jersey, Western
France, and Switzerland, and remembering who
were the early inhabitants of these places and of
Northern France, that the brownish-black cattle
may have been brought to Britain by the mari-
time inhabitants who had crossed over from the
country of the Belgae for the sake of plunder
and war before Czesar’s day.’

1 Ceesar’s “ Gallic War,” bk. v. chapter xii.

VIII
THE MELTING-POT

Havinc now identified the races of cattle that at
one time or another have arrived in Britain and
partaken’ in the production of the breeds we
now possess, we have next to inquire how each
race modified or was modified by the races that
arrived before or behind it. It has already been
stated, that the great agricultural awakening com-
menced in the seventeenth century. From that
time forward the desire for improvement grew
keener and keener, and although, even at the
present day, that desire is happily still strong, it
might be said quite fairly, considering all the
circumstances, that it reached its height about the
junction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
One of its many forms was to improve the live-
stock of the country. Men travelled long dis-
tances in order to procure cattle which they
thought better than those of their own district,
and as the cattle imported from the Low

1 A few black-and-white cattle and some other cattle—the
Channel Islanders, for instance—have come in, but they have
taken no part in producing our present breeds.

88

THE MELTING-POT 89

Countries were larger and, in the opinion of
eighteenth-century stock-breeders, better than
those that were in Britain before them, it was to
their descendants that men turned for stock with
which to improve their own. The Longhorns,
which were a combination of the Dutch and
several of the races in Britain before them, were
the great “improvers” till the end of the
eighteenth century, when they were ousted from
that position by the Shorthorns, and to some
extent, the Herefords, two breeds also of com-
posite character. But we shall better under-
stand the process by which some of our modern
breeds have been produced—the jumbling to-
gether, as it were, of different races and the
emergence of new types of stock—after a short
consideration of Mendel’s theories, just as we
should better understand how certain salts may
be mixed together and new ones produced, by
some knowledge of chemistry.

It is one of the greatest tragedies in science
that Mendel’s “ Experiments with Plant Hybrids”
(“‘ Versuche iiber Pflanzen Hybriden ”), which was
published by the Natural History Society of
Briinn in 1865, remained unknown till the present
century. It is impossible to imagine where we
should have been to-day in our knowledge of
heredity had Darwin only known of Mendel’s
work. But Darwin’s own discovery so entranced
the world that Mendel’s was condemned to

90 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

oblivion till years after both discoverers were
dead. As it is, we must now go back, and
partially, at least, revise some of Darwin's
conclusions. |

One of Darwin’s main contentions was that
races of animals vary, but, as he thought, slowly
and constantly ; that, to take a homely case, the
neck of a giraffe is slightly longer than his
father’s, that his father’s is slightly longer than his
grandfather's, and so on backwards: thus, that
the differences between a set of animals and their
descendants a hundred generations younger are
really the sum of all the small accretions added
on (or taken off, for that matter) by each
successive generation.

But De Vries has shown that sudden and
observable changes take place among plants, and
that these changes may be inherited: ‘ Varieties
have often been observed to appear at once,
and quite unexpectedly in horticulture and
agriculture.”* Let us view De Vries’s discovery
as described by Professor Arthur Thomson * :—

“In 1886 De Vries began hunting about
around Amsterdam for a plant which would show
hints of being in what we may call a changeful
mood. He tried-over a hundred species, bringing
them under cultivation, but almost all were dis-
appointingly conservative. It seemed as if most

1 De Vries’s “ Species and Varieties,” 1905, p. 16.
2 “ Heredity,” 1908, p. 91.

THE MELTING-POT gI

of the species around Amsterdam were in a non-
mutable state. It is possible, as Weismann
suggested in one of his first evolutionary essays
(1872), that in the life of species, periods of
constancy alternate with periods of changeful-
ness. The human historian has often made a
similar remark.

“In the course of his wanderings around
Amsterdam, De Vries came across a deserted
potato-field at Hilversum—a field of treasure for
him. For there he found his long-looked-for
mutable plant, an evening primrose (@xothera
lamarkiana). Like its nearest relatives, Gxo-
thera biennis and Cinothera muricata, which it
excels in size and beauty of flowers, it probably
came from America, where it is a native. It
had probably ‘escaped’ at Hilversum about
1875, and in the following ten years it had
spread in hundreds over the field. It had been
extremely prolific in its freedom; but that was
not its chief interest.

“Its chief interest was its changefulness. It
had, so to speak, frolicked in its freedom.
Almost all its organisms were varying—as if
swayed by a restless tide of life. It showed
minute fluctuations from generation to genera-
tion ; it showed extraordinary freaks like fascia-
tion and pitcher-forming ; it showed hesitancy as
to how long it meant to live, for while the
majority were biennial, many were annual, and

92 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

a few were triennial; best of all, it showed what
can hardly be otherwise described than as new
species in the making.

“It is possible that the prolific ‘multiplication
in a new environment may have had something
to do with the awakening of the impulsive
mutability.

“In 1887, a year after his discovery of the
potato-field, De Vries found two well-defined
new forms—a short-styled O. dvevisty4is and a
beautiful smooth-leaved O. devifolia—distinguish-
able from the parent in many details. He hailed
these as two new ‘elementary species,’ and he
applied one of the crucial tests of specific or sub-
specific rank: Did they breed true? He found
that it was so; from their self-fertilised seeds
similar forms arose. Neither of the two new
forms was represented in the herbaria at Leyden,
Paris, or Kew; neither had been described in
the literature of Onagracee. They seemed to
be distinctly new. It is interesting to note that
in 1887 there were few examples of these two
new elementary species, and that each occurred
on a single plot on the field. The impression
conveyed was that each had arisen—by a
sudden mutation—from the seed of an individual
parent.

“ The next chapter in the famous investiga-
tion began with a transference of samples of the
new forms and the parent stock—partly as plants

THE MELTING-POT 93

and partly as seeds—from the potato-field at
Hilversum to the botanic garden at Amsterdam.

“ The three stocks gave rise under cultivation
to many thousands of individuals, which bred true
along certain lines, and yet gave rise to other
new forms. In short, De Vries had found a plant
in the process of evolution.

‘The predisposition to mutability—which re-
mains a mystery—was present. De Vries gave
it scope, and like the primeval gardener he had
the pleasure of giving names to a crop of new
creations which emerged before him. From each
of these three samples there arose distinctive
groups—which, if they had been found in nature,
would have been reckoned as distinct species of
evening primrose. But the most interesting
feature was the apparent abruptness in the origin
of the new forms. They seemed to rise by leaps
and bounds, by organic jerks; they illustrated
what De Vries has called ‘ mutation.’ ”

It does not concern us here whether De
Vries’s mutations were the result of a new en-
vironment or of some other cause. The point
for us is that while there may be variation in
the Darwinian sense, there are also sudden
changes when animals of different characters are
bred together, and under certain circumstances
these changes are inherited. Mendel’s theory
explains both the changes and their inheritance.
Mendel’s original experiments were made with

94 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

plants, but, as similar results have been obtained
again and again with animals, we may substitute
animals for plants. When white cattle are mated
with red, their progeny (first crosses) are roan;
but when these roans are mated together, a quarter
of their progeny return in colour to the white
parent race and a quarter to the red parent race,
while the remainder are roans again, like their
parents. Mendel’s theory explains such phe-
nomena. He conceived the idea that an animal
carries, from its very beginning, determinants
which are going to decide, one its eventual colour,
another its size, another its length of limb, and
so on; and that a half of each determinant is
inherited from each parent. Each determinant
is therefore, as it were, bicellular, bouble-barrelled.

A roan animal's red parent carries a double-
barrelled determinant for redness, which we may

Aer ; :
represent thus : °’ while its white parent carries

another for whiteness, which we may represent

thus : Ae

When a red animal is mated with a white,
their determinants meet, and the young, taking
a half of that offered by each parent, starts off
with a determinant, one half of which is for red-
@

ness, the other half for whiteness, thus: ~, and

THE MELTING-POT 95

its coat is a mixture of red hairs and white—that
is, roan. The proportions of the two kinds of
hair vary greatly : the white hairs being sometimes
so few that the roan is almost a red, and the red
sometimes so few that it is almost a white."

When roan crosses are bred together their
progeny select their colour determinant one half
from each parent, and the chances are one that
both halves will be red; two that one will be
white and one red; and one that both will be

; ‘ e—@
white. It may be a union of these , or

OO

ee. ®@ e@ 6 oe ®

these eird) or these ot 6! or these as

Consequently, from a sufficient number of mat-

ings, a quarter of the calves must be red, a half
roan, and a quarter white.

Again, when red cattle are mated with roan

ones, one half their calves are red, the other half

_ roan. Combining the four little diagrams as above,

—@ . ca (
e528 gives two reds _, and two roans °
6-0 & O

Further, when white cattle are mated with
roans, one half their progeny are white, the other

half roan. a aad gives two whites je and two

O
roans —,

? White cattle with the black or brown “ points” of the “ wild ”

park cattle behave as pure whites, and red and white flecked cattle
behave as pure reds.

96 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

The following table shows the average numbers
of calves of each of these colours that may be
produced by all the possible matings :—

Red Roan White
.-) So,

% ho vA
Red x Red fe bse oo 100 ° °
White x White ... ea aa re) fe) 100
Red x White... ee ve fe) 100 °
Red x Roan... ats ae! SO 50 °
White x Roan ... vee - ° 50 50
Roan x Roan ... sn seeks oe 50 25

Thus it will be seen that, although by crossing
white cattke and red a new colour, roan, is
produced, that new colour itself is unstable and
throws back constantly to one or other parent
race. A similar result follows when white cattle
are crossed with black: the intermediate hybrid,
as it is called in Mendelian phraseology, being in
this case a blue roan.

But, although these intermediate hybrids are
unstable, they may be the means of transferring
the colour of one kind of cattle from that kind to
another kind. The transference of the white
colour of the Roman cattle to the black Welsh
cattle is a simple case. A white Roman bull
breeds with black Welsh cows and produces blue-
roan calves. These again breed together, and
25 per cent. of their calves are white. In other
respects some of these white calves are Romans,
some Welsh, and thus, in two generations only,
some black Welsh cattle may be turned white.

Perhaps, for exposition’s sake, a more striking

THE MELTING-POT 97

case could be imagined. If one or more white
Shorthorn bulls were put to a herd of red North
Devon cows, their progeny would all be roans.
At the same time, they would be intermediate
between their parents in size, as well, perhaps, as in
some other things which we may neglect for the
present. If those roan crosses were bred together,
25 per cent. of their progeny would be white, 50
per cent. roan, and 25 per cent. red. At the
same time, 25 per cent. of the whole would be
Shorthorns in size, 25 per cent. Devons, and 50
per cent. intermediates. But, as the chances are
absolutely against both colour and size varying
together, there are reds, whites, and roans among
the cattle of Shorthorn size, and reds, whites, and
roans among those of Devon size. The white-
coloured cattle of Devon size are white Devons,
from which any number of white Devons might be
produced, and by the use of such cattle the whole
red Devon breed could be made white in not so
very many generations.

There are, however, hybrids which are not
obvious intermediates, but which masquerade in
the guise of one of their parents. The progeny
of black and red cattle are black, yet they are
hybrids nevertheless. When these masquerading
hybrids are bred together, a quarter of their
progeny are red, like one of their grandparents,
and three quarters are black, like the other, but
of the black ones only a third are genuinely black :

H

98 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

the others are masqueraders—hybrids, like the
roans, although they pretend to be otherwise.

The explanation is that, while one half of the
colour determinant of these crosses is for blackness
—derived from the black parent—and the other
half for redness—derived from the red parent—
the relationship between blackness and redness is
such that blackness holds the mastery and obscures
or hides redness. Redness is all the time latent,
however. In Mendelian phraseology, blackness
is dominané to redness, and redness is recessive to
blackness.

These phenomena may be made clear dia-
grammatically. We shall use letters instead of
circles, and, for convenience, we shall use capitals
to denote the dominant characters and small
letters to denote the recessive.

Black cattle mated with red produce masque-
rading black hybrids, thus—

95, Ae B
3 # gives only ss

When masquerading black hybrids are bred
together, their progeny receive their colour de-
terminant, one half from each parent, and the
chances are: one that both halves will be black,
two that one half will be black and the other
red, and one that both will be red. It may be

, BB. By B.
a union of these, ai aah these, ig or

THE MELTING-POT 99

Be, or these, wat Consequently,
4) 4—>r

from a sufficient number of matings a quarter

these,

of the calves are pure black, f: a half are

masquerading blacks, lf and a quarter are pure
red, _.
rv
Again, when black masqueraders are bred
back to pure black cattle, one half their progeny
are pure black, the other half masqueraders.

—>

Thus Bey gives two pure blacks, a6 and
B

two masqueraders, ‘

Further, when black masqueraders are bred
back to red, one half their progeny are masque-

Lo agi aie
raders, the other half are red. +2 y gives two

B r
masqueraders, pe and two reds, y

These black masqueraders cause confusion,
since they cannot be separated from the pure
black ones by the naked eye; but, like the
intermediate roans, they may also be the means
of transmitting a colour from one set of cattle to
another. For instance, red cattle of North Devon
type were taken to the south of Ireland a century
ago, or more, and crossed with the native black
Kerry cattle. The result of the crossing and

100 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

recrossing was that some calves were pure black,
others were masquerading blacks, and others
were pure red. The red colour is not admired -
by Kerry breeders, and no attempt has been
made to keep it; but, because of the difficulty
of identifying and, so, eliminating them, when
masquerading blacks are mated together, red
calves are occasionally born. If these red
calves were kept and bred from, the Kerry
black breed could eventually be converted into
a red breed. By doing this, the Highland
breed of cattle has been changed from one
that once was largely black to one that is now
largely red.

But the Kerry breed is of further interest
because, while the Devons transmitted to it their
red colour 2 Zotentza, they also transmitted their
shortness of leg. In this case shortness was
dominant to length. The result of the crossing
was that some calves were pure short-legged,
others were masquerading as short-legged, and
others were long-legged. Thus among each of
the three different colours of Kerry cattle—
pure blacks, masquerading blacks, and reds—
there are pure short-legged animals, masquerading
short-legged animals, and long-legged animals.
That is to say, among Kerry cattle now, as
compared with Kerry cattle long ago, there are
some possessing characters, redness and short-
leggedness, which have been transmitted to them

THE MELTING-POT IOI

by another breed. Such short-legged cattle are
distinguished from ordinary Kerries by being
called ‘ Dexters.”

Still another case might be quoted. At one
time the cattle of Suffolk were hornless and
light dun, while their neighbours were horned
and red. Breeders preferred the hornlessness
of the one breed and the redness of the other.
The hornless character is dominant to the
horned ; consequently, as a result of crossing
horned and hornless cattle, there were produced
pure hornless cattle, masquerading hornless
cattle, and horned cattle; but, by continually
selecting hornless ones to breed from, the
masqueraders and the horned ones were worked
out. When the light dun Suffolks were crossed
by red cattle, there resulted yellow intermediate
hybrids ; but when these were crossed by red
cattle, half their progeny were red. By the
persistent selection of red-coloured cattle, the
original light dun colour and its derivative yellow
were eventually worked out. Thus the old
Suffolks and their neighbours became one breed :
the Suffolks giving up their colour and their
neighbours their horns.

It is not necessary for us to consider cases in
which three or more characters have been trans-
ferred from one breed to another.

IX

THE DUTCH SUPREMACY

WE have already shown that, in Mortimer’s
time, 1716, there were Dutch cattle in Lincoln
and Kent, and that by Culley’s time, 1794, they
had completely conquered the east coast from
Lincolnshire to the borders of Scotland. Un-
fortunately there were no Culleys to record their
progress in the midlands and the counties on
the west, but we can infer from the English
“Agricultural Surveys,” published about the
junction of the eighteenth and _ nineteenth
centuries, that the Dutch conquest was almost
as complete in the west as in the east.
The impression conveyed by these surveys is
that from Lincolnshire westwards to Warwick
and Worcester, and from there up the western
side of the Pennine Chain as far as North
Lancashire and Westmoreland, the older in-
habitants had been swept out for many years.
Indeed, some of the writers of the surveys
thought the Dutch cattle around them were the
old native race. These circumstances, along with
the Herefordshire belief that Lord Scudamore

102

THE DUTCH SUPREMACY 103

imported Dutch cattle in the seventeenth century
—it must have been before 1671, for he died
then—indicate that Dutch cattle may have been
brought to the west coast almost as early as to the
east. It may be doubted, however, whether the
eastern and the western conquests were exactly
alike. On the east coast the Dutch invaders
seized the land almost for themselves alone, while
in the midlands and in the west it was rather
an amalgamation of the invader and the invaded.
The cattle on the east retained the characteristics
they had brought with them from Holland, and
acquired no others, while the cattle in the
midlands and west eventually acquired cha-
racteristics drawn from both Dutch and British
sources. The cattle of Hereford and some
neighbouring districts acquired their red colour
from their Anglo-Saxon ancestors, and their size
and their white faces and underlines from
Holland; while the midland and Lancashire
cattle—the Longhorns—acquired their size and
white back-stripe from Holland, and their various
colours—red, yellow, mulberry, plum, dun, the
brindles, and so on—from the red cattle in the
south of their territory and the Celtic and other
cattle in the north. It is also highly probable
that the long and peculiarly shaped horns of the
Longhorns are a direct or indirect—perhaps both

—legacy from the cattle brought to Britain by
the Romans.

104 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

_ Thus these three kinds of cattle, the Here-
fords, the Longhorns, and the Shorthorns, the

first two largely of Dutch descent, the last almost _ ,

entirely so, were established in England in the
first half of the eighteenth century. But the
territories they occupied were too small for
them. The Longhorns were the first to make
this discovery, and, casting envious eyes on the
fertile country to the south, they sent out wave
after wave of their surplus population, until by
the end of the eighteenth century they and their
progeny by English cattle possessed it all as far
south as the Sussex downs, leaving the com-
paratively less fertile outside rim to such as the
Herefords, the Devons and Somersets, the
Sussex, the Suffolks, and the Norfolks.1 To
the east they were balked by the Pennine Range
and the Shorthorns; to the north the prospect
was less encouraging, but across the Irish Channel
they found a promising outlet.

Ireland was ripe for the importation of superior
bovines. The seventeenth century had been a
century of ‘plantations ”—Elizabeth’s, James's,
and Cromwell’s. Much of the land had become
the property of the English and Scots. The
cattle of the country were of the same race
as the small black Celtic cattle of Scotland and

1 The Dutch cattle that came to Kent and perhaps Essex
made no great headway. The Kent cattle probably handed on
their size to the Sussex.

THE DUTCH SUPREMACY 105

Wales, excepting, perhaps, in the south, where
there may have been some small red cattle of
North Devon type. Knowing the superiority
of the cattle in England, many owners of land
in Ireland sent there for cattle, and Lancashire
and the western counties being most convenient
for transit, as well, perhaps, as possessing the
most superior cattle, were naturally resorted to.
Eventually, as in the south of England, the
Longhorn overran the most desirable parts of
the country, and, at the time of Arthur Young’s
visit (1776-78) they and their cousins that had
been graded up from the original black Celtic
stock, and were now for the most part pure
Longhorns, were in possession of the great
central plain of Ireland, from one side of the
country to the other, and of the fertile valleys and
smaller plains running into it from both sides:
the native cattle having been driven into the
higher and less fertile regions to the north and
to the south. At the same time considerable
numbers of Longhorn cattle were carried else-
where for colonising purposes. They were
carried into Wales, the north of England, Scot-
land, and even to the Orkney Islands, but in
these at that time somewhat backward countries,
although they left signs of their visits, they made
no great progress.

Hemmed in on the south by the Longhorns,
on the west by the Pennine Chain and the

106 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

Longhorns, and on the north by the backward state
of the country, the east country Dutch cattle—
the Shorthorns—were prevented for a time from
extending their territory. The state of the north
in the beginning of the eighteenth century may
be imagined from the fact that while there were
many considerable provincial towns in the south,
and two of them, Norwich and Bristol, had about
30,000 inhabitants, there were really only four
important towns in the north, viz. York with
10,000 inhabitants, Edinburgh with 30,000, Glas-
gow with 12,000, and Aberdeen with about
10,000. In those days a traveller might have
travelled from London to York by coach, but
beyond that he must have used pack-horses.
The means of communication may have been
good enough even for cattle of an improved
breed, but the deplorable lack of winter food,
especially in Scotland, was sufficient to prevent
the Shorthorns spreading northwards quickly.
Brigadier Mackintosh, a partaker in several
rebellions and in many continental fights, while
lying. prisoner in Edinburgh Castle somewhere
between 1719 and 1729, thus describes how cattle
were treated in Scotland: *“‘Nor can it be
otherwise in the supine ignorance our Farmers
are in, in the Method of choosing the right ages
of putting up to fatten their Beasts and the want

1 “An Essay on Ways and Means for Inclosing, Fallowing,
Planting, etc., Scotland,” 1729, p. 131.

THE DUTCH SUPREMACY 107

of every Provender fit to raise them: For they
generally never stall any, but such Oxen as are
no longer fit for the Yoke ; or Cows, but such as,
the Goodwoman tells her Husband, are no longer
good to breed or milk: These, for eight or ten
weeks, they blow up with scalded Barley, Chaff,
and Malt-grains; that lean Rickle of Bones, is all
the Butchers can pick up in Fife and Lothian,
from Candlemas to June, even for our Metropolis.
No other town is so well served. ... I am
informed, that some Gentlemen of Edinburgh,
send to Berwick for their Beef and Veal. . . .
Methinks, it should raise the indignation, as well
as Shame of all Scotsmen, as I cannot conceal it
does very much mine, that our chief Town
cannot, for 4 or 5 Months of the Year, furnish
Meat for a Gentleman’s Table, but we must send
to England. . . . Let us inclose* and furnish
Stock of proper Maintenance for our Cattle for
Winter and Spring, of Turneps, Fog and Hay,
my Life, we shall raise our Beasts as high and
fat proportionable to their Bone, as their Valley of
Essam, let be their Berwick. . . . And I believe
now, a great many English Gentlemen, who, in
our Highlands, in the Month of May, see the
Leanness the Country Beasts are then in, to the
Degree they must be helped up when they fall or
ly down of themselves, &c., &c.”

But as the desire for agricultural improvement,

1 That is, fence common lands, etc.

108 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

which had begun in the south and which had
acquired such vigour after Tull and Townshend
discovered how to grow turnips about 1730, crept
northwards, an outlet was made for the Shorthorns
which they quickly made use of. Before the end
of the eighteenth century they and their crosses
were masters of the east of England and the
eastern lowlands of Scotland from Lincolnshire
to the Forth. And not only so, but some of
them had already penetrated into Fifeshire to
improve the cattle of that country, while from
others which had found their way westwards
across the mountains the modern Ayrshires were
ere long to emerge. In the last quarter of
the eighteenth century the great struggle for
the possession of Ireland, in which the Long-
horns were eventually to be driven from the
field, was begun by the importation of Short-
horns from Holderness and Teeswater. Arthur
Young (1776-78) reports having seen at least
two lots of those first imported to Ireland at
Armagh in the north and Doneraile in the
south.

The West Country Dutch Shorthorn Cattle—
the Herefords—had to wait many years till they
found an outlet for their surplus population.
They extended their original territory westwards ;
towards the end of the eighteenth century they
made a descent upon Ireland, in the midland
counties of which they have retained their hold

THE DUTCH SUPREMACY 109

to the present day; but their great opportunity
came in the nineteenth century when hardy
grazing cattle were wanted for the ranches of
North and South America and some British
Colonies.

Xx
BAKEWELL

It may be doubted whether the idea that their
live stock might be improved ever took much
hold of British farmers’ minds before the arrival
of the importations of cattle and other stock from
Holland. At any rate it was not the overmaster-
ing idea it has since become. For one thing,
they knew of nothing either very much better or
very much worse than their own, unless, perhaps,
on the common frontiers of two races, say the
English and the Celtic, or here and there in the
north, when the rievers returned from a raid far
over the border. It is true that in ‘ Senes-
chaucie,” written not later than the time of
Edward the First, it is laid down that the cow-
herd ‘‘ must see that he has fine bulls and large
and of a good breed pastured with the cows.”?
It is also true that several English sovereigns
took steps to improve the breed of horses, and
that Henry the Eighth imposed a fine of forty
shillings on ‘lords, owners, and farmers of all
parks and grounds enclosed as is above rehearsed,

1 Walter of Henley’s “ Husbandry,” pub. 1890, p. 113.
110

BAKEWELL III

who shall willingly suffer any of the said mares
to be covered or kept with any Stoned Horse
under the stature of fourteen handfuls.”* And
advice like the following is found in some seven-
teenth and eighteenth century writings: The
cattle “in Somerset-shire and Glocester-shire,
are generally of a blood red colour, in all shapes
like unto those in Lincoln-shire, and fittest for
their uses. Now to mix a race of these and the
black ones together is not good, for their shapes,
and colours are so contrary, that their issues are
very uncomely: therefore I would wish all men
to make their breeds, either simply from one and
the same kind, or else to mix York-shire with
Stafford-shire, with Lanca-shire or Darby-shire,
with one of the black races, and so likewise
Lincoln-shire with Somerset-shire or Somerset-
shire with Glocester-shire.”? Yet it does not
appear that there ever was any clear idea of
improving the cattle of the country till the seven-
teenth and the eighteenth centuries ; and the first
sign of it lay in the Dutch importations, or rather
not so much in the importations themselves, for
the original importers may have intended to keep
the imported stock pure, as in the phenomenally
rapid swamping of the native cattle by continued
crossing with imported stock. ‘“ The means of

' Ridgeway’s “Origin and Influence of the Thoroughbred
Horse,” 1905, p. 360.
2 Markham’s “ Cheap and Good Husbandry,” 1683, p. 70.

112 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

improvement, in the established practice of the
kingdom at large, are those of selecting females
from the native stock of the country, and crossing |
them with males of an alien breed.”* It was by
such crossings that a few breeders in the English
midlands came to. possess some cattle that were
better than their neighbours’.

Then came Robert Bakewell, the master of
them all, to show how those somewhat casually
obtained improvements might be conserved and
perpetuated. Results similar to those obtained
by the midland farmers may have been obtained
much earlier elsewhere—in Hereford by Lord
Scudamore, for instance, or in Lincolnshire—but
there is no evidence of Bakewell having had any
forerunner. j

The first part of the story may be told by
Youatt.? “It was not, however, until about the
year 1720 that any agriculturist seemed to possess
sufficient science and spirit to attempt the work
of improvement in good earnest. A blacksmith
and farrier, of Linton, in Derbyshire, on the very
borders of Leicestershire, who at the same time
rented a little farm, has the honour of standing
first on the list. His name was Welby. He had
a valuable breed of cows which came from Drake-
low House, a seat of Sir Thomas Gresley, on the

! Quoted from Marshall’s “Rural Economy of the Midland
Counties,” published, 1790, in ‘“‘ The Complete Farmer,” 4th ed.
2 “Cattle,” p. 190.

BAKEWELL 113

banks of the Trent, about a mile from Burton.
He prided himself much in them, and they
deserved the care which he took in improving
them and keeping the breed pure ; but a disease,
which defied all remedial measures then known,
broke out and carried off the greater part of them,
thus half ruining Welby, and putting a final stop
to his speculations.

“Soon after this Mr. Webster, of Canley,
near Coventry, distinguished himself as a breeder.
He too worked upon Sir Thomas Gresley’s stock,
some of whose cows he brought with him when
he first settled at Canley. He was at consider-
able trouble in procuring bulls from Lancashire
and Westmoreland, and he is said to have had
the best stock of cattle then known. One of his
admirers says that ‘he possessed the best stock,
especially of deace, that ever were, or ever will be
bred in the kingdom.’ . . . Little more is known
of Mr. Webster than that he established the
Canley breed, some portion of whose blood flowed
in every improved long-horn beast.

‘The bull, Bloxedge, the Hubback of the long-
horns, and, like him, indebted to an accident for
the discovery of his value, was out of a three-
year-old heifer of Mr. Webster's, by a Lancashire
bull, belonging to a neighbour.”

Now came Bakewell. He was born, “early
in the year 1726, at the Grange, Dishley, two
miles north of Loughborough, in the county of

I

114 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

Leicester.”* He was come of a family dis-
tinguished for centuries in both Church and State.
‘The most remote ancestor named in the records
of the family was Leverrettus, Thane of the
King, and King’s Chancellor in the reign of
Henry II., presented to the rectory of Bakewell,
in the county of Derby, in the year 1158.” The
Grange farm was 440 acres in extent, and Bake-
well’s father, who had always the reputation of
being one “of the most ingenious and able
farmers of his neighbourhood,” died in 1773,
when he was 88 years old, and when Bakewell
was 47. It is thus possible that some part of
Bakewell’s work may have been traceable in
knowledge, thought, or action to his father. At
least, in their improvements, other than those
connected with stock-breeding, there was a clear
continuity.

Prothero, in his ‘Pioneers and Progress,”
tells us that Robert Bakewell “resembled the
typical yeoman who figures on Staffordshire
pottery, ‘a tall, broad-shouldered, stout man, of
brown-red complexion, clad in a loose brown
coat and scarlet waistcoat, leather breeches, and
top boots.’ In his kitchen he entertained
Russian princes, French and German royal
dukes, British peers, and sightseers of every

1 The information about Bakewell is drawn mostly from a
paper by W. Housman in Zhe Fournal of the Royal Agricultural
Society of England for 1896.

BAKEWELL 115

degree. He never altered the routine of his
daily life. ‘Breakfast at eight; dinner at one;
supper at nine; bed at eleven o'clock; at half-
past ten, let who would be there, he knocked
out his last pipe.’” Clearly another Miller o
Dee: “I care for nobody, no, not I, and
nobody cares for me”: the kind of man who,
having discovered his way, would stick to it!

For his time and occupation, Bakewell was
a great traveller. In early life he “often left
his home to travel about England.” ‘He saw
much of the west of England”; he saw the
north-west and the south-west; he saw
Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and Norfolk; and he
also travelled in Holland. Whether he travelled
to find or travelled and found cannot now be
told—probably he did both—but at one time
and another he brought home the choicest of
their stock from several of the places he visited:
cattle from the borders of Westmoreland, Lanca-
shire, and Yorkshire, sheep from Yorkshire and
Lincolnshire, and horses from Holland. Here
we are concerned only with cattle.

One statement regarding Bakewell, namely,
that he thought the Devon cattle incapable of
improvement by crossing with any other breed,
indicates that, at one time, Bakewell held his
neighbours’ views as to how cattle should be
improved, and this is confirmed by the fact that
his stock were gathered from herds in different

116 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

parts of the country, and that the cows he
bought from Mr. Webster of Canley were put
to a bull from Westmoreland. From the time,
however, when he obtained that Westmoreland
bull, which was somewhere about 1760, Bake-
well continued to put his own stock to his own,
regardless of their relationship and of the custom
and sentiment of the country. It must also be
remembered that he had probably tried this
system with sheep before adopting it with cattle.
Several reasons might be imagined for Bake-
well having adopted the system of in-breeding.
He was a great traveller, a close observer, and
an unparalleled judge. He must have seen
how animals came truer to their kind when bred
pure, and how irregular were the progeny of
cross-breds; and he may have argued that the
mating of close relations was the very essence
of pure breeding. Or he may have been a
pre-Darwinian Darwinist, and argued that an
accumulation of good qualities could only be
secured by their continued infusion. Or, still
more likely, failing to find a better bull than
Twopenny—the produce of the Westmoreland
bull and a Canley cow—and fearing to use a
worse one, he may have been compelled, senti-
ment or no sentiment, to stick to his own.
This view is supported by Marshall, who was
deeper in Bakewell’s confidence than any other
writer, and who was, to some extent, the

BAKEWELL 117

expositor of his ideas: ‘‘ The argument held out
in its (in-breeding’s) favour is, that there can
be only one best breed; and if this be crossed,
it must necessarily be with an inferior breed ;
the necessary consequence of which must be an
adulteration, not an improvement.” *

In any case, Bakewell adopted the system
of in-breeding, and, looking back, we can now
see how it was possible for him to have done
what he did. He came upon the scene during
the great agricultural transition and near the
beginning of the rise in British industry and
commerce. Formerly the cow had been valued
for her milk, the bullock for its labour, the
sheep for its wool, and the horse for its strength
and weight in battle. Now the horse is to
split into two kinds, one valued for its strength,
the other for its speed, and the former is to
drive the bullock from the plough to the feeding
stall. At the same time, the new agricultural
discoveries and the new crops are to allow the
bullock to be fattened off at an age at which,
in former days, he would have been beginning
his career in the plough and the waggon. Now
it is not a bullock that will grow for three or
four years and remain active and lean for a
similar period that is wanted, but one that will
fatten quickly and easily at the end of his period
of growth. Bakewell saw that a new kind of

1 “The Complete Farmer,” 4th ed., under article “ Cattle.”

118 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

animal must be bred from. Before his time
calves that showed a tendency to fatness were
turned into veal, while those not showing this.
tendency were retained. Bakewell reversed the
process, and secured animals likely to breed
him stock for the butcher rather than for the
plough. :
After long observation, with close inspection
not only of the living but also of the animal Zosé-
mortem, and with many experiments in the use
of such feeding stuffs as were then in use at
Dishley, Bakewell set up a type for himself and
to that type bred persistently. With the light
cast upon Bakewell’s work by Mendel’s discovery
we can now see that some of the stock from
which Bakewell bred may have been mere mas-
queraders and must have produced him not only
masqueraders again but also some others that
were frankly undesirables. Bakewell’s original
stock were certainly not pure, for they were
drawn from the north and from the south, from
parts of the country in which the recently im-
ported Dutch cattle, themselves possibly of
several breeds, had mingled with several others.
To eliminate from these those that did not breed
true to the type he desired, Bakewell took the
quickest and surest method, namely that of
mating close relations; for in those days of
almost haphazard breeding, two closely related -
animals were much more likely to be pure for the

Le 177%

BAKEWELL 119

same characters, than two animals
drawn from different parts of the
country or even of a county.

Apart from the fact that he was
a man of outstanding ability, power,
and perseverance, there are several
points in connection with Bakewell
and his work that will bear re-
iteration :

(z) He was an unparalleled judge

of stock.

(4) He was at enormous pains to
secure the best stock in the
country for his purpose.

(c) Having secured these, he

bred from remarkably close
relations.

(d) He ruthlessly eliminated un-
desirable stock.

The truth of this last statement
may be inferred from the facts that
he educated breeders’ tastes to a
change of type, that from such
mixed foundation stock as he began
with he must have bred many un-
desirables, and that he used his
bulls till they were very old and
that upon their near relations.

The accompanying diagram,
showing the pedigree of two of

120 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

Bakewell’s bulls, Twopenny and D, and of D’s son
Shakespeare, bred by Mr. Fowler of Rollright
in Oxfordshire, will indicate Bakewell’s system.

The figures in brackets attached to a bull’s
name indicate, approximately, the date of its birth.

In addition to being the great pioneer in
the art of stock-breeding, Bakewell also took
the lead in organising a system whereby the
“blood” of his stock was disseminated among
the stock of other breeders, while at the same
time its connection with the fountain-head was
not necessarily broken. A good many of his
bulls and some of his cows were sold outright.
Even in Ireland Arthur Young (1776-78) re-
ported twelve or fifteen cases in which cattle had
been brought direct from Bakewell. But to
farmers in his own neighbourhood Bakewell
arranged to let out some of his bulls for a
season, at the end of which they returned again
to Dishley. For instance, Bakewell’s bull D was
once let to Fowler of Rollright.

This system was advantageous to men of
smaller means, as well as to Bakewell, for, if
he discovered that any animal which had been
let out produced unusually good stock, he could
recall that animal for his own use at the end of
its season. This system was adopted by other
Longhorn breeders and in breeds that were
established subsequently to the Longhorns.

It has often been argued that the system of

BAKEWELL 121

breeding which Bakewell established must be a
wrong one, since the breed which he did so much
to improve, and which at one time overran a
great part of England and almost the whole of
Ireland was well-nigh extinct within a century
of the time when Bakewell was in his zenith.
But it must be remembered that another type
of animal has been in demand since Bakewell’s
day. The Longhorns were graziers’ cattle—slow
to mature as we now understand them, and
capable of withstanding the severity of winter
in the open air. The great increase of tillage
farming in the east of England and of dairy
farming in the neighbourhood of large cities
demanded a bullock that would turn turnips and
straw quickly into beef in a stall or covered shed
and a cow that also in the house would produce
a large quantity of milk and afterwards fatten
quickly. If only for its horns alone, the Long-
horn was not the animal to meet this demand.
But the greatest argument for the Bakewellian
system is that the breeds that superseded the
Longhorn were originated, and have been main-
tained, in the same manner. Besides, to say
nothing of his horses, the blood of Bakewell’s
Leicester sheep, which were equally or more
in-bred than his cattle, now flows in the veins of
every ‘“‘longwooled ” sheep that trots, and is still
alive in almost absolute purity in two breeds
—the Leicesters and the Border Leicesters.

XI
BLENDING AND SORTING

Tue East-country Dutch cattlhe—the Shorthorns
—pursued a course somewhat similar to that of
the Longhorns. In the territory they had won,
however, they mingled much less with the
natives, but rather drove them out before them.
As we have already seen, they pressed north-
wards, and a branch, bending westwards, shared
in producing the modern Ayrshire. No doubt,
native blood was absorbed here and there, only
for its outward tokens to be eliminated again in
a few generations.

But in Yorkshire there was a permanent
amalgamation from which the modern Shorthorn
is descended. Storer’ mentions a number of
herds of domestic white cattle in the north of
England, some of which, if not all, were in
existence before the Dutch invasion. In the
first half of the eighteenth century stock were
distributed from at least one of these herds,
Studley Royal, near Ripon, which had at that
time a high reputation over West Yorkshire

1 “Wild White Cattle of Great Britain.”
122

BLENDING AND SORTING 123

and Durham. By uniting with these
cattle the Dutch Shorthorns absorbed
the white colour of the Roman cattle
and along with it the roan, which is
a hybrid between the Dutch and
Roman colours. About the same
time the Shorthorns also absorbed
the blood of some of the native black
cattle, but the black colour at any
rate was soon bred out, while, even
to the present day, the blood of
Anglo-Saxon red cattle has been
frequently absorbed, the colour in this
case to be retained.

Having been originally of several
types, as Culley told us, and having
absorbed this strange blood in
England, the Shorthorns also re-

_ quired a Bakewell; and him they

found in Charles Colling, who had
been a pupil with the great master
himself. The following diagrammatic
pedigree of Charles Colling’s great

bull Comet will show how closely
-he followed Bakewell.

Here, again, we have a breeder .
who, like Bakewell, started with the
best stock he could find, and, by in-
breeding, eliminated the chances of
uncertainty in their progeny; and

124 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

his system, much modified, has been adopted
by the leading Shorthorn breeders down to the
present day. How much this means to a breed
can be inferred from the fact that the blood of
the stock of the highest class breeders soon
permeates a breed through the demand made
upon it for breeding purposes by other breeders.
Thus, at the present day there are no Short-
horns which are not descended from Charles
Colling’s Comet again and again.

Among the Shorthorns, as among the Long-
horns, there was first a mingling of races and
afterwards a retention of the desirable and an
expulsion of the undesirable characters produced
by the mixing. All other breeds have gone
through the same process of mixing first and
purification after, some to a less, others to a
greater extent. For instance, the white colour
has been expelled from pure-bred Welsh cattle,
the hornless character and the light dun colour
have been expelled from Somerset and Devon
cattle, and while the Norfolks and the Suffolks
have amalgamated, the former have given up
their horns and the latter their colour; but, if
we take a short survey of the history of Aber-
deen-Angus cattle we shall see the process from
more sides than in any other breed, and at the
same time get a glimpse perhaps of what may
be possible in the future.

At the present day Aberdeen-Angus cattle

BLENDING AND SORTING 125

are hornless, similar in weight to Shorthorns
and Herefords, and black, with occasional white
markings upon the back underline. In the
stock-breeder’s sense of the term the Aberdeen-
Angus breed is pure ; but the irregular occurrence
of white on the underline suggests that from a
more stringent point of view the purity is not
absolute. For that matter, it is inconceivable
that any set of animals of more than one cell
—or even of one cell, perhaps—can ever be
absolutely pure.

But other irregularities sometimes occur,
although with less and less frequency as time
goes on. A red calf, a calf with a white spot
on its face, another with one or more white
flecks on the body, another with “scurs,” that
is, small epidermal growths attached to the
skin and not to the skull, are not entirely
unknown. Twenty or thirty years ago such
phenomena were more common than now. At
that time a calf with a brown stripe down the
back and a tan muzzle, another with brindle
markings, and another with short horns was not
a ferlie—was not a marvel. Sixty or seventy
years ago these phenomena were all common,
and horned and hornless cattle, many of the
former the ancestors of the present-day hornless
cattle, competed together for prizes even at the
shows of the Highland and Agricultural Society
of Scotland. A century ago the horned and

126 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

the hornless grew up side by side not only
on neighbouring farms but in the same fields,
claiming frequently to be children of the same
parents. At the same time, there were colours
and markings among them not now seen at
all: dun, yellow, “what Youatt called ‘silver-
coloured yellow,’” and white stripes along the
back and belly. Many, too, of both kinds were
not much more than half the weight of their
present-day descendants.

Still further back—say a hundred and fifty
years ago—they were all, or nearly all, of this
smaller size; but the horned kind were in the
majority in the inland parts, while the hornless
kind, which were creeping inwards, prevailed
near the coasts. Beyond that we have no direct
evidence, but tradition says the inland cattle
were originally horned and the maritime cattle
hornless. So, do we not eventually reach back
to the arrival of the long-headed, high-polled,
hornless whity-grey or light dun Scandinavian
cattle upon the coasts of Scotland, and are we
not reminded of the traditional battles between
Danes and natives and between the white Danes
and the black Danes in the neighbourhoods of
Cruden in Aberdeenshire and Lunan Bay in
Forfarshire ?

The first crosses between the Scandinavian
cattle and the black horned natives were dun
hornless masqueraders, which, when they were

BLENDING AND SORTING 127

bred together, produced blacks (25 per cent.),
duns (50 per cent.), and light duns (25 per
cent.), among each kind of which there were
horned cattle (25 per cent.), hornless masque-
raders (50 per cent.), and hornless cattle (25 per
cent.). That is to say, among sixteen cattle—
any number might be taken—the chances were
that there were 4 blacks (1 horned, 2 hornless
masqueraders, and 1 hornless), 8 duns (2 horned,
4 hornless masqueraders, and 2 hornless), and
4 light duns (1 horned, 2 hornless masque-
raders, and 1 hornless).

Again, when the first crosses—the dun horn-
less masqueraders—were bred with the natives,
there were produced, blacks (50 per cent.) and
duns (50 per cent.), among each kind of which
there were horned (50 per cent.) and masquerading
cattle (50 per cent.). Thus, if farmers had a pre-
dilection for either of the two new productions—
the black hornless or the light dun horned—
they had merely to keep on breeding from these,
and, in time, they would have nothing else.
There being no deception about the colours, it
is easy to see how the whity-grey or light dun
vanished long ago, and the dun lingered on a
while longer, while the hornless masqueraders,
a gradually decreasing number, kept the horns
bobbing up till comparatively recent times.

The blackish-brown cattle, the ‘ foundlings ”
as we have called them, the date of whose

128 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

arrival upon the scene we have been unable to
fix, produced brindles with both races—dark
brindles with the black natives and light brindles
with the Scandinavians. Here again, there being
no deception, or, at any rate, only a slight one,
for dark brindle is sometimes very nearly
black, we can understand how, when _ black
became the favoured colour, the brindles and
their blackish-brown parent would gradually
disappear.

But other races intervened—the Anglo-Saxon
red race—whether openly and frankly in earlier
days, or, disguised in their partial progeny the
Longhorn, early in the eighteenth century; the
Longhorns themselves, with their white finch-
backs and white underline; and lastly, the
Dutch flecked race, first in the guise of Fife-
shire cattle, and, later on, as Shorthorns.
And these races left their marks, some to be
eliminated easily, others with difficulty. When
red cattle were bred with blackish-browns and
light duns, they produced brindles and yellows,
and these, being unwelcome, were bred out
quickly ; but, when bred with black cattle, they
produced black masqueraders. We can thus
understand why an occasional red calf turns up.
Masqueraders are difficult to deal with, and,
when two of them meet, there is one chance in

1 There is a probability that these cattle may have absorbed
Dutch blood direct from Holland before the Shorthorn invasion.

BLENDING AND SORTING 129

four of their progeny being red, as may be seen
from this Mendelian scheme—
B28
ry

The white markings of the Longhorn are
dominant to black on the same parts of the
animal, and, being always visible, were easily
eliminated. So far as our present knowledge
goes, the white flecks seem to have been
recessive characters, which again would account
for the difficulty of breeding them out.

But perhaps the most important character
which the Aberdeen-Angus cattle received from
other races is their size. Crossed again and
again by larger breeds, they eventually became
as large as the cattle by which they were crossed.
Whether the first crosses were intermediate or
masquerading hybrids is not absolutely clear,
but in any case, the initial crossing and the con-
tinued selection of the larger animals for breeding
purposes resulted in a small breed being con-
verted into a large one. The following quota-
tion,’ part of which is irrelevant as regards size

2 A OTE a
may produce p) )> p? Or,

1 When red cattle were bred with duns, the hybrids of light
dun and black, they produced blacks and yellows, thus—

<>
ey gives (black), and f (yellow).
=>
2 A part of this communication was quoted in the chapter on

the Norse Cattle,
K

130 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

but is of supreme interest otherwise, indicates that
the crosses between the small breed and the large
were intermediate hybrids. It is a communica- |
tion to the authors of the “ History of Polled
Aberdeen or Angus Cattle,”* from Mr. William
Forbes, an Aberdeenshire farmer, whose grand-
father was a farmer in Buchan (East Aberdeen-
shire), and bred polled cattle :—

“The cattle in Buchan about half a century
ago and earlier might be said to have consisted
of horned and polled black cattle in about equal
proportions. The polled cattle were of two
classes, one large and another small. I knew
the small kind well. They were rather puny
creatures, always thin in flesh, and very badly
used, They were pre-eminently the crofter’s
cow, as they were able to live through the winter
on the straw of oats and bere, and water, if
necessary. Of the larger portion of the cattle,
about one-half were jet black, and often the
whole underline was white. They could not
stand starvation so well as the small polls, but
with better treatment they gave a heavier yield
of milk. A few were of a dull-red colour, but
they were not so high in favour as the brindled
cattle. The polled cattle were the dairy stock.
The butter they produced was very fine in
summer and autumn, but hard and white in
winter. The establishing of a beef trade with

1 Macdonald and Sinclair, published 1883, p. 72.

BLENDING AND SORTING 131

England, and the introduction of Shorthorn bulls
and turnip husbandry, opened up a new era for
Buchan. The native cattle fattened well, and
money was made by doing so. Shorthorn bulls
were introduced and put to all kinds of cows.
Often when a Shorthorn bull was mated with
a small polled cow, the produce was a black poll
of the finest character—immensely superior to
either of the parents. When a heifer of this
stamp was again put to a Shorthorn bull, the
result was quite as fine a black poll, of still
larger size. If the produce were also a heifer,
and mated with a pure Shorthorn bull, the result
was still a poll, yet larger in size, but bluish-
grey in colour. If a heifer again, and put to
a Shorthorn bull, the produce was once more a
grey poll, probably lighter in colour. When this
form of crossing was continued further, Shorthorn
colours appeared, sometimes with scurs, but
oftener with the regular short horns of the male
parent. I observed this experiment tried in
several cases, with exactly the same result.
With the larger polls with white underlines, the
horns and colour of the Shorthorn bull were
earlier transmitted to the produce, generally at
the second or third crosses. I therefore look
upon the small polls without white spots as the
pure original Buchan Humlie.”

Thus, with the characters they now possess
drawn from several sources, the Aberdeen-Angus

132, EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

cattle have come down to the present day—not,
however, without their Bakewell to establish
them, and his successors to maintain them in )
equilibrium. |

The Aberdeen-Angus Bakewell was Hugh
Watson, the son of farmers and polled cattle
breeders on the borders of Forfar and Perth,
who, in 1808, at nineteen years of age, got a farm
for himself and six of his father’s “best and
blackest cows, along with a bull, as a nucleus for
an Angus doddie herd.” Within a month or two
he went twenty miles north to Brechin, the great
market of those days, and bought “the ten best
heifers and the best bull he could procure.” And
more than half a century later, when his work
was done, Hugh Watson’s cattle were almost, if
not entirely, descended from the cattle he began
with in 1808.

How far Watson was driven to the system of
in-breeding by force of circumstances, and how
far by example, cannot be told; but it must be
remembered that, being another unparalleled
judge, and having begun his herd with the best
he could find, it was afterwards difficult for him
to get other cattle as good as his own. It must
also be remembered that Charles Colling’s Comet
was sold for a thousand guineas in the year
1810.

By exhibiting the last three or four genera-
tions that led up to Hugh Watson’s greatest bull,

Grondtoor 4
Doddit

BLENDING AND SORTING 133

S>Olt Jock 1942

ee SK ae Sak tg

3

D> Grey, Sreaahid Tock 183
a,

és

Old Favenrnt

Jack

Jick 1820

>

OLD JOCK’S PEDIGREE.!

Old Jock, born in 1842, we shall
see the Bakewellian method as
carried out in its most intense
form. Then, by another diagram,
we shall see the streams through
which the blood of Old Jock
flowed down to some of his
most illustrious descendants, first
at Mains of Kelly and Kinnaird,
in Forfarshire, then at Tillyfour,
in Aberdeenshire, and finally at
Ballindalloch, in Banffshire, the
places to which in succession
Aberdeen-Angus breeders have
turned for stock bulls and higher
class cows and heifers. A short
examination of these diagram
pedigrees will show that the in-
breeding begun by Hugh Watson
was continued, though with less
intensity, by his successors. The
extraordinary concentration of Old
Jock blood in Aberdeen-Angus
cattle to-day may be gathered
from the fact that it would be
difficult, if not impossible, to find

1 In the “Aberdeen-Angus Herd Book,”
and in other writings there is some confusion
as to Old Jock’s pedigree; but, after con-

siderable inquiry and examination, the above
seems to be its last few generations.

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BLENDING AND SORTING 135

an Aberdeen-Angus animal born within the last
four or five years which is not descended from
Iliad more than once.

One other Scots breed—the Highlanders—is
also of some interest. Its basis was the original
black Celtic cattle. The browns or (in Gaelic)
donms came in at some time or other, and brindles
appeared from the cross. The hornless light
dun Scandinavians came in and produced hornless
cattle and duns with the black ones, and further
brindles with the donns. Subsequently red
English—some of them with Longhorn markings
—reached the Highlands, and there resulted
another brindle with the donns, and a yellow by
crossing with the light duns; but the Longhorn
markings and the hornlessness got from the
Scandinavians have been eliminated. The follow-
ing diagram will show how the present Highland
colours were produced from the original four :—

XII
SPECULATIONS

Ir is not the purpose of this book to deal fully
with the principles of stock-breeding, but some
phases of the question raised by the preceding
chapters might be referred to with interest at
least. It cannot have escaped the notice of any
one who has read the last few chapters how large
have been the parts played by crossing and in-
breeding in bringing our British breeds of cattle
to their present position. At the same time, it
must be admitted that it is not clear that every-
thing accomplished has been due to the action of
those two factors. There may still be something
more—there may still be the constantly accumu-
lating change which Darwin believed in, although
it is hard to think that changes which formerly
took thousands and thousands of years may now
be induced by man’s action in two or three
centuries; and there may also be De Vries’s
mutations or organic “ jerks,” the results of
changed conditions in food, climate, or any other
form of environment. So far these questions
must be left undecided ; but it seems impossible
136

SPECULATIONS 137

to account for the extraordinary milking powers
of some animals and the beef-producing powers
of others without the assistance of Darwin or De
Vries or somebody else. Did any Dutch cows
produce twelve hundred gallons of milk a year,
or did any Dutch bullocks weigh thirteen or
fourteen hundredweights at less than two years
old two hundred years ago; or if they did not,
could they have done so provided they had
received similar treatment to that received by
their descendants in Britain to-day? To answer
these questions is of course to answer the
former ones; but as we have no data before us
to answer these, the former must also remain
undecided.

These remarks lead to another phase of the
same question, namely, Is it possible, without
crossing, to endow a set of animals with cha-
racters which none of them already possess? For
example, is it possible, without crossing, to make
the North Devon as large as the Shorthorn,
or as black as the Aberdeen-Angus? If Darwin’s
theory be correct, then it might be possible, but
how long would it take? If De Vries’s organic
jerks occur, it may also be possible, but who
is to have the patience to sit down and watch
for them? On the other hand, it must be remem-
bered that the origin of all our improved breeds
has been in the selections of such men as Bake-
well and his kind, of unparalleled judges as we

138 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

have called them ; and that when the originally
selected type had been steadied or fixed by in-
breeding, the breed as a whole was gradually
graded up to their standard by persistent mating
with the selected type.

Within the above question lies another much
smaller to a breed but larger to many an indi-
vidual breeder: Is it possible for a second class
herd to be raised to. the first class without
recourse to the assistance of first class stock?
Again the answer must be the same: that it
may be done; but in how many years, or in how
many lifetimes? Few, if any, of our first class
herds have been raised in this way. Some may
have been raised by continued infusion of the
highest into lower types—by grading, as it is
called—but most of our great stock-breeders date
their entry into the highest ranks from the time
they acquired the highest class of stock and com-
menced to eliminate the lower.

Among stock-breeders generally there is a
very strong aversion to in-breeding, although it
was the method of the great pioneers and is
still the method in a modified form, called line
breeding, among breeders of the highest class.
The origin of this aversion would be difficult
to trace, although it has been frequently suggested
to have been biblical. It existed in Bakewell’s
day and how long before we do not know; but
if it existed in much earlier days it is difficult

‘egies
Soe ae zante iced
en ES mA selianiaets aa

SPECULATIONS 139

to see how farmers were able to make their
practice agree with their theories. Nature her-
self seems to have no special aversion to the
practice. The wild bull keeps possession of his
own glen and his own herd till he is ousted
perhaps by some stranger from across the hills,
but more likely by his biggest brother or his
eldest son who so far has been kept at a distance
by the fear of his parent's horns. According
to some authors the evils of in-breeding are
almost innumerable: barrenness, lack of size,
milk, constitution, hair, and so on; tuberculosis,
rheumatism, leanness, fatness, long legs, short
legs, brainlessness, and every other form of retro-
gression. Families and tribes that once had the
highest reputation are now no more, nearly
extinct, or relegated to an inferior position. But
would the type that was best half a century ago
be the best to-day? Have not some that formerly
were less regarded now found favour? Besides
when a tribe or type gets into a prominent
position, and its individual members rise in money
value and so get into the hands of wealthier men
but poorer judges, who is to see to their proper
mating, and the elimination of such animals as
are below the standard? And when animals
whose money value is large get into the posses-
sion through inheritance or otherwise, of poorer
men but better judges, how are these men to
determine whether their purse or their taste is

140 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

to prevail? In the face of some of the preceding
chapters and these considerations, in-breeding
must escape the charges against it with at least
the Scots verdict, not proven. When once a
breed has been established, however, that is to
say, when it has reached such a degree of steadi-
ness that it can be called “ pure,” the need for
in-breeding is greatly decreased.

But what of the future? Does the past offer
any guide? Previous to the discovery of Mendel’s
work, the dictum of the past as to the con-
ditions for success in cattle-breeding would have
been—

(i) A good judge.

(ii) Good stock.

(iii) Line breeding with old-established and

in-breeding with new breeds.

(iv) Ruthless elimination of the unfit.

But although Mendelism would not alter the
dictum it would increase the breeder’s power
by increasing his knowledge of the working of
Nature’s laws. Already in this paper such of the
Mendelian knowledge as is yet known with
regard to cattle is referred to. So far that know-
ledge is not great, and it is largely concerned
with comparatively unimportant matters, like
colour, for instance; but as the signs by which
Mendelian characters can be identified become
better known, it is hoped that information about
much more important matters than colour may

SPECULATIONS 141

be gathered. And, when this happens, things
that now come and go in the most mysterious
manner will be under the cattle - breeder’s
control.

Perhaps the best way to make the possible
power of Mendelism clearer is to consider what
signs ought to be looked for in reference
to a matter of some considerable importance,
namely, milking capacity. This capacity varies
enormously, a fact which in itself suggests a
Mendelian phenomenon. Some bulls have a
reputation for leaving good milking, others for
leaving poor milking, stock :‘another circumstance
pointing to the same conclusion. If milking
capacity be a Mendelian phenomenon, then the
way in which it will show itself will depend
upon whether the hybrids between high and
low milkers are intermediates or masqueraders.
It must be remembered that other factors inter-
fere with milking capacity as such alone. The
cow’s size, age, and health might be mentioned,
for instance. If these other factors can be elimi-
nated, then, if the hybrids are intermediates,
there will be three grades of cows, viz. high
grade, medium, and low grade. The cows’
grade being manifest by their yield of milk,
the difficult part of the problem is to determine
the grade of the bull; and for this there is only
one test, the test of breeding. He is either high
grade, middle, or low grade. The following,

142 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

table will show the grades of stock each grade

of bull should get with each grade of cow :—
High Middle Low

grade grade grade
stock. stock. stock.

% % %

High grade bull with high grade cows should get 100 ll —
a ma middle grade cows _,, 50 5o —

low grade cows ms — 100 —

Middle ede bull with high grade cows ,, 50 sol
yi “f middle grade cows ,, 25 50 025

low grade cows ,, — so =O ss §o0

Low bedile bull with high grade cows me — 100 —
ny ae middle grade cows ,, — 50 = «§0

es a5 low grade cows 93 sai = oe

But the greatest difficulty of all perhaps is that a
bull’s grade is not known till he is at least five or
six years old. How is this to be overcome?
The pioneers adopted two methods ; they kept
their bulls till their grades, so to speak, were
known—Hugh Watson’s Old Jock won the
sweepstakes at the Highland Society’s Show at
Perth when he was ten years old—and they bred
from closely related animals. The former method
was safest; the latter placed the chances on the
right side, for there is a higher probability of the
same characters being carried by near than by
distant relations. But, just as the Aberdeen-
Angus breed has been gradually made hornless,
so, by constantly selecting the breeding stock—
the bulls are the most important—from high grade
cows a whole breed could be raised eventually to
the highest milking capacity.

If the hybrids between high grade and

SPECULATIONS 143

low grade milkers were masqueraders, then
apparently there would only be two grades of
cows ; but two-thirds or so of one of the grades
would be masqueraders. The difficulty again
would be to find a bull that was pure high grade.
Again there is only one test, the breeding test ;
and in this case it might be summed up shortly
by saying that if a bull is pure high grade, his
daughters from both kinds of cows ought all to be
high grade milkers.

One other character might be suggested, as an
example. It has been found that the short legs
of animals of North Devon type are dominant to
the long legs of the Kerry. The same seems to
be the case among Shorthorns and Aberdeen-
Angus. That is, short-legged Shorthorns and
Aberdeen-Angus are dominant to long-legged
ones. That being so, there occurs in these breeds
occasionally a long-legged animal, just as a red
animal sometimes appears among Aberdeen-
Angus. Bred to a short-legged beast, this
animal’s progeny will be short-legged, but not
pure. It will be a masquerader. If it be a bull
and put to short-legged cows, the progeny will
also be short-legged, but half their number will
be impure. If that bull be followed by another
of similar character, a quarter of his progeny
from the previous bull’s daughters will be long-
legged.

These are only two characters that might be

144 EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

looked into, but there are others of importance
which might be suggested, viz. :—

The capacity for fat production in milk ;

The capacity for fatness and leanness ;

The presence and absence of black noses ;

The Shorthorn and the Aberdeen-Angus
shape of rump ;

Thickness and thinness of skin ;

Longness and shortness of face ;

The shape of the horns ;

A strong as against a weak constitution.

The subject must be left as it stands until
future research has shown us still further into
Nature’s ways.

INDEX

ABERDEEN-ANGUS Cattle, 56, 124,
132

Aberdeenshire Horned and Horn-
less Cattle, 52, 54

Alderney Cows, 76

Anglo-Saxon Cattle, 38

Angus Cattle, 52

Ayrshire Cattle, 108, 122

BatLEy’s description of Chilling-
ham Cattle, 4

Bakewell, 110

Banffshire Cattle, 55

Bede on the English Migration, 38

Bloxedge, 113

Boece’s Caledonian Bulls, 7

Bos longifrons, 13, 15

Bos primigenius, \

Brindled Cattle, 84, 128

*‘ Brown” Cattle, 83, 125, 127

Buchan Polled Cattle, 52, 130

Burghead Bulls, 63

Csar’s One-horned Ox, Elk, and
Urus,

_ Caithness Cattle, 57, 66

Channel Islands Cattle, 65

Cheshire Black Cattle, 42, 75

Chillingham Cattle, 4

Colling, Charles, 123

Comet, 123

Crossing, 112, 137

Culley’s description of the Dutch
imported Cattle, 77

Darwin, De Vries, and Mendel,
89, 137

Darwin on Hornlessness, 45
De Vries, 90

Derbyshire Black Cattle, 42, 75,
It

Devon Cattle, 42, 43, 100, 104, 115,

124
Devon Natts (Polled Cattle), 59, 64

| Dobinson’s Importations of Dutch

Cattle, 78
Durham (the) Dun Cow, 51
Durham (old) Polled Cattle, 50
Dutch (the) Cattle, 64, 70, 75, 76,
77, 89, 102, 118, 128

EGYPTIAN Horned Cattle, 29, 30
Egyptian Hornless Cattle, 67
Egyptian Long-horned Cattle, 30

FERAL Cattle, 34
Fifeshire Cattle, 54, 56, 108, 128
Forfarshire Cattle, 52, 54

GaLLoway Cattle, 53, 59

Gloucestershire Cattle, 75, 76, 111

Grading, 138

Green (J. R.) on the English Migra-
tion, 39

Green’s (J. R.) Line, 36

Gresley, Sir Thomas, 113

Har Longhorns, 78

Harting’s List of Parks of ** Wild”
Cattle, 36

Hereford Cattle, 42, 43, 80, 89,
103, 104, 108

L

146 INDEX

Highland Cattle, 58, 84, 85, 100,
135

Hornlessness, 46

Hornless Cattle in Britain, 46, 61

Hornless Cattle in Holland, 66

Hornless Cattle in Northern
Europe, 66

IcELAND Cattle, 66
In-breeding, 13, 116, 118, 138
Ireland, 85, 104

Irish Polled Cattle, 60, 108
Italian Cattle, 29

Jersey Cattle, 85, 87

KENT Dutch Cattle, 75, 103
Kerry Cattle, 100

LANCASHIRE Black Cattle, 42, 75,
Itt

Lancashire Longhorns, 103

Lincolnshire flecked (Dutch) Cattle,
42, 75, 76, 102

Lincolnshire Red Cattle, 42, 43,
III

Line Breeding, 140

Longhorns, 41, 42, 43, 54, 56, 78,
80, 83, 85, 89, 104, 105, 121, 128

McKeEnny HuGukEs on the native
British Cattle, 17

McKenny Hughes on the Roman
Cattle in Britain, 26

Mackintosh, Brigadier, 106

Maoiles (the Irish), 60

Markham, Gervaise, 41, 75

Mascal, Leonard, 43

Masqueraders, 97

Mendel and Mendelism, 89, 94, 118,
140

NorFOLkK Cattle, 42, 43, 49, 104,
124
Normans (the), 64

Norse Cattle in the Channel Islands,
Holland, Orkney, Shetlands, and
Iceland, 65

Norse Cattle in Britain, 45

Norsemen (the), 62, 64

Northern (the) or Yorkshire Polls,

49
Norwegian Cattle, 67

OLD Jock, 133
Orkney Cattle, 65

RoMAN Horned Cattle in Britain,
25
Roman Hornless Cattle in Britain,

Romans (the) in Britain, 32
Ross-shire Cattle, 57

SCANDINAVIAN Hornless Cattle,
66, 126, 128

Scandinavian origin of British Horn-
less Cattle, 62, 65

Scott’s (Sir Walter) Mountain Bull,
8

Scots Wild Cattle, 7

Scudamore’s (Lord) importation of
Dutch Cattle, 81, 102

Scythian Cattle, 67

Shakespeare, a Longhorn Bull, 119

Shetland Cattle, 65

| Shorthorns, 41, 54, 56, 80, 89, 104,

106, 122, 128
Skye Polled Cattle, 57
Somersetshire Polled Cattle, 60
Somersetshire Red Cattle, 75, 76,
104, III, 124
South European Cattle, 28
Staffordshire Black Cattle, 42, 76,
III
Staffordshire Dutch Cattle, 81
Suffolk (the) Duns, 47, 64, Io1,
104, 124
Suffolk Red Cattle, 42, 43, 101, 124
Sussex Cattle, 42, 43, 104
Sutherlandshire Polled Cattle, 57
Swedish Cattle, 68
Swiss Cattle, 85

3
¥
’
}
.

:

INDEX 147

TOWNSHEND (LorRD), 74, 108 Welsh Cattle, 76, 124
Tull (Jethro), 74, 108 Weston, Sir Richard, 74
Twopenny, 116, 119 White Yorkshire Cattle, 122

** Wild ” White Cattle, 3, 25
Wiltshire Red Cattle, 75

Urus (the), 9

YORKSHIRE Black Cattle, 42, 75,
Watson, HucGu, 132 76, 111
Webster, of Canley, 113 Yorkshire Polled Cattle, 49, 64

Welby, of Linton, 112

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The evolution of
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