cows there, than at any other place with which I am acquainted on that road; and I attribute that quality to the mixture of the Devon blood, rather than to the character of our pasturage, though I think a good deal of the pasturage of those hills, as having something to do with the results. I would remark here, that there are no Jersey animals, to my knowledge, in any of the herds that send milk to New York. The Devons would have to yield the palm for color when the Jersey comes on the ground; but among other breeds of cattle, we claim fine color and fine body for the Devon milk, and the quality of the butter is not a whit inferior to that made from the finest Jersey, although that bears such a price as throws Devon butter into the shade. But that is another question; the intrinsic value of the product I am now speaking of in the Devons. With regard to the milking qualities of the Devons, all the females are not to be classed among "tea-cup cows," as they have been sometimes. Lieut. Governor Hyde, who is an extensive breeder of Devons, recently informed me that at the Massachusetts Agricultural College, they are now testing the four leading breeds, Shorthorns, Devons, Ayshires, and Jerseys, as milk producers. He had sent some of his stock there, and they had informed him that at present the Devons are leading as milk producers. As to the richness of Devon milk, the stories connected with milk in many respects have somewhat of a fishy odor, as it is said. We have a record of the amount of butter produced from a given quantity of Devon milk, and although we receive it from unquestioned authority, still it is rather incredible. I will give my authority. Mr. J. N. Blakeslee of Watertown, Conn., who is a breeder of Devons, states that in the autumn, his son, after feeding a Devon cow upon pumpkins freely, took her milk and set it by itself, carefully saved the cream and churned the butter, and the product was one pound of butter to 3.66 quarts of milk. Probably they were milk quarts, because this experiment was conducted some years ago, when milk quarts were more in fashion than they are now.

MR. PARRIS. How do you compare the Devon oxen with the Durham in point of strength and work?

MR. GOLD. You cannot get as much weight in a pair of Devons, on a given surface of space, as you can in a pair of Durhams. In our quarries in Middle Haddam, Conn., where they use over one hundred yoke of oxen all the time, feeding them on grain, they want high grade Durhams; they want the heaviest cattle they can

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get, so that they can bring great weight in a limited space, and put that weight right on to a rock and go along; that is what they use them for. They do not want Devons there. Their cattle are all of this heaviest class. But for our country farm work in Connecticut, we want the Devons. They will travel further, they will plow more, they will draw a cart anywhere with a load as big as ought to be put on a cart, they will climb our hills, and they will do any amount of farm work. A pair of Devons will do more than a pair of Shorthorns that will weigh a thousand pounds more, and we think it does not cost so much to keep them. Certainly they will go round and gather up their living and be fat upon rocky fields, where the Shorthorns will not. But when they want cattle to put into these quarries, and give them all the grain they can eat every day for a year, so that when they stop working them they go at once to the shambles, they want a different class of stock. High grade Shorthorns are bred expressly, in the valley of the Connecticut, to supply those quarries.

I have been repeatedly called upon by friends in cities to furnish them with a cow that would give good milk for family use. They were not particular about the quantity, but they wanted good milk. I have met that demand satisfactorily by going to a neighbor and getting a high grade Devon. The problem has been satisfactorily solved; they have always been satisfied with the milk produced by such an animal.

We next come to the Ayrshires. These have been bred for a long period in Scotland upon hard hill pastures, for the express purpose of producing milk for the making of cheese. They are not a large breed; they are hardy, but the quality of their milk, when tested for butter making, does not compare favorably with that of the Jerseys. The cream does not so readily separate from the milk as in the Jersey, but the richness exists in the milk. It is rich in all the constituents of milk, and they seem particularly adapted to the production of milk for cheese and for market. Few owners of Ayrshires claim excellence for them as butter makers, though there are some cases on record which show a good yield in that direction; but their record as milk producers is perfectly astonishing. I have in memory one cow which appears in the last Ayrshire herd-book-"Red Rose"-I forget her owner and her number, she was a small cow, (the Ayrshires are all small,) that gave 84 pounds of milk in a single day, and her average for some two months was 67 pounds a day. Eighty-four pounds is as near

forty-two quarts, wine quarts, as you can make it. measured by wine quarts.

Milk is now

At the first

There are other examples given of Ayrshire cows. exhibition of the New England Agricultural Society, there were some Ayrshires exhibited from Maine whose record was very remarkable indeed, considering the size of the animal. You have a small animal; about eight hundred pounds live weight gives you a pretty respectable Ayrshire cow; and it is claimed, and I believe undisputed, that for the amount of food consumed, the Ayrshire will give more milk than any other breed of cattle.

I will now pass to the fourth class-the Jerseys. The Jerseys are a breed long established in the Channel Islands, lying between England and France. They are sometimes called "Aldernays,' but the proper name is Jerseys, and that embraces all those animals which are brought from those islands. There is another little island, Guernsey, which differs a little in the character of its animals, but they have one general class of characteristics. They are a small, fine-boned, fine-limbed, and rather nervous and excitable breed of animals, but their leading characteristic is the exceeding richness, most people say, of their milk; but I say, the richness of the color of their milk. It has been laid down as a rule by some writers, that the Jersey milk, although its richness was claimed to be so great, was no richer actually than the Ayrshire or the Devon. I would hardly assert that, but I do assert that a large part of its apparent richness is due to the exceeding richness of color and the fact that the cream so readily and perfectly separates from the milk. Jersey skim milk is almost always of poor quality; it is the poorest kind of skim milk; while the Devon skim milk is claimed to be as good as the new milk of other breeds for ordinary household purposes. I have spoken of the price obtained for Jersey butter as a fancy one. I believe it is on record, and not to be disputed, that Mr. Sargent of Brookline, Massachusetts, sold his whole product of butter the past year to a dealer in Boston at $1.15 a pound, and that he sells it to his customers at $1.25; and they are satisfied and glad to get it at that. Other Jersey breeders have to be satisfied with 75 cents per pound, and so on until you come down to the common price which farmers get, twenty-five to thirty or forty cents a pound, just as the quality or the reputation of the dairy may be.

Now, setting aside this fancy value, the Jerseys, for the high color which they impart to their milk, seem to be worthy of intro

duction, in part, at least, into every herd where butter-making is followed, to give, at least, color to the butter. This is the universal advice, I believe, upon that subject. While they lack somewhat in hardiness, while their extreme nervousness and somewhat fidgety nature makes them not the most pleasant animals to herd with others, a high grade Jersey will so improve the richness of the color of your butter, that they should have a place in every herd designed for its manufacture. As a butter cow, in the vicinity of cities, where they can have nice care, and as a pretty object to be petted, they are in great favor, and pay their breeders high prices for raising them; but as farm stock, except for the purpose of giving color to the butter, they can hardly be commended, or for the especial purpose of butter-making, to meet this fancy demand.

I have gone over the ground now with regard to the merits of these different breeds, and every farmer must choose for himself, for his own wants, for his own neighborhood, his own soils, which class of these animals it is most desirable for him to obtain. And here comes up another point, which is the power of transmission of the qualities which any animal may possess to its progeny. have said, with regard to the natives, that this power of transmitting their properties, with any tolerable degree of uniformity or certainty, was not possessed by them; .but there are breeds of animals, there are families of animals, that possess the power of transmitting their qualities to their progeny in a very high degree and with great uniformity and certainty; and that is true of every one of those classes of which I have spoken. They have been bred for centuries with one single object in view in each case, and that has been kept uppermost all the time, until it has become an established habit with them. You may have accidentally an Ayrshire that is not famous for milk, or you may have a Jersey that is wanting in the peculiar characteristics of that breed, but they are very rare exceptions indeed. They breed like their dams, like their sires, with a good degree of certainty, and it is only by breeding from such stock that you can hope to secure a superior herd of animals. The best farmers in the world, those who pursue a system of "stick-to-it-iveness" far surpassing anything ever adopted in this country, have been sticking to these breeds for more than a hundred years, or back to the earliest records, right along; they have stuck close to one object, until they have secured the power in their animals of transmitting their good qualities to their progeny. Now, the value of an animal for breeding purposes

does not depend so much upon the actual merits of that animal, as it does upon his power of transmitting his good qualities to his progeny. It is true, his bad qualities are also transmissible, but an animal that belongs to one of these thoroughbred classes has greater power, although he may be a failure in some respects, of transmitting the good qualities of that breed in a high degree to his progeny, than even a superior animal that may have some taint of inferior blood in his ancestry. Hence, in building up a herd of animals, it is now announced as an established fact in breeding, one that you cannot gainsay, nor get around, that if you wish to improve your herds in any particular, you must obtain a thoroughbred bull of that class of animals that possesses those qualities which you desire in the highest degree, and continue to breed from that stock. That rule is laid down without any fear of contradiction. Now, if you want to build up a breed for butter-making, you will introduce the Jerseys. If you want milk for cheese or for sending to market, you cannot do better than to take the Ayrshires. If you want to breed oxen for farm use, and cows that will produce an excellent quality of milk for all purposes, you cannot do better than to take the Devons. And if beef is your object, early maturity, fine growth, a class of animals that will make the most pounds of flesh on what they consume, the habit of the Shorthorn is such that you cannot do better than to take the Shorthorn, if you have plenty of feed for them.

There is one other consideration in regard to the Shorthorn as a dairy animal, that I would call to your notice. The grade calves from Shorthorns are almost universally large. If you want to make veal, that is an object. For early sale to the butcher it is very important that calves when they are dropped should weigh something like 100 pounds. It is a good start to get an animal of that size, and they will grow right along. But if your object is merely milk and you purpose to dispose of most of your calves as they do in most dairy districts by the process called "deaconing you want to rear a calf that will make the least drain upon the system of the cow, that is, require the least draught to support it; and with the Ayrshires, the Jerseys or the Devons, you will secure such an animal. Not only are the thoroughbred calves of these breeds small, but they are so small that your farm help will often tell you that they are not worth raising. I have been met a great many times with such a statement as this: "That little Devon calf you have got there will never amount to any thing, it is of no