continental states and of the United States,
and shows the proportion of live stock of
each kind to each hundred acres of area
and each hundred of population. According
to these tables, Holland and Belgium—-
butter and cheese exporting countries—- stand
highest in proportionate number of cattle to
acreage, but rather low in the proportion of
their total stock to the number of their
population—- Belgium being, as compared with the
United Kingdom, as fifty to one hundred and
thirty, our inferior number of cattle being made
up by the superior number of sheep. On these
tables Professor Rogers, of Oxford, has
constructed a theory that the number of live
stock in Great Britain is decreasing, in
consequence of the tendency of small farms to be
amalgamated into large ones. All existing
evidence is opposed to this theory, and is in favour
of the assumption that there is a steady increase
in the quantity of live meat produced on every
acre of land occupied for farming and grazing
in the three kingdoms—- more especially in
Scotland and England, the countries of large farms.
Indeed, a very little consideration will show that
the naked figures of these comparative tables
give the least possible information of any useful
kind. Thus Ireland, from its moist climate, is
essentially a grass country; indeed, it is now
often called " the natural home of the short-
horn," the most profitable meat-producing breed
in the world. Within the recollection of middle-
aged men of the present generation, the cattle
of Ireland were of the unprofitable, slow-growing,
long-horned, thick-skinned breed. These
have been superseded, on nearly all but high
mountain ranges and the poorest wastes, by
the short-horn and its crosses. In nearly all
the grazing counties of Ireland, for the last
twenty years, the long-horns were year after
year turned into oxen and exported, the breeders
resorting to imported short-horn bulls only. The
steady sale of lean stock to English graziers
assisted the change. The consequence is, that
not only is Ireland stocked with the modern
breed, but it has become the country on which
English graziers chiefly rely for the young stock,
technically stores, which they grow into beef.

Now, if we were to judge only from figures,
we should decide that Ireland was better
supplied with live stock than Scotland, and was
even better farmed, while the exact reverse is
the fact. Scotland has very little beef-feeding
pasture as compared with Ireland—- although
Scotch turnips are the very best in the world—-
but what she has is grazed by the choicest
beef-makers. All her good land is well stocked;
but an enormous per-centage of the acreage of
Scotland is irreclaimable waste. The primest
joints of metropolitan markets are of Scotch
beef. Valleys, and moorland, and mountain-tops,
that formerly fed such half-starved wild cattle
as Rob Roy " lifted," are now more profitably
given up to sheep, Cheviots and Blackfaces, both
migrants from England. Again, since easy
conveyance and good markets, with the spread
of root-cultivation, have led the Scotch to
fatten a great number of their beeves at
home on turnips, English graziers have been
obliged to look more to Ireland for their
supply of store-cattle, horned manure makers,
and consumers of root-crops; while, until the
outbreak of the rinderpest, not only did the
dairies of the metropolis depend largely on
Holland for milch cows, but Norfolk and
other feeding counties began to draw " stores"
from the Continent. On the other hand,
neither the climate nor the genius of the
Irish people is so well suited to the growth of
sheep, although there is no doubt that whenever
Ireland becomes really tranquil, the number of
the long-woolled sheep—- than which no animal
is more profitable—- suited to the climate will be
largely increased. The peasant-farmers of
Ireland contribute next to nothing to the stock
of beef-producing animals, and nothing to that
of mutton. The export to England is drawn
from the great farms of the grazing districts.

The comparisons of the number of cattle and
sheep in Great Britain and in France or
Germany are, to say the least, very unprofitable,
because the first elements of comparison are
wanting. It is like the early Japanese trade
of exchanging gold for silver by weight.
In France, for instance, in 1862, there were
nearly six million cows and eight million of
other cattle, fourteen millions in all, for a
population of thirty-seven millions, while Great Britain,
with not quite five million cattle, had a population
of over twenty-three millions to feed. Yet
meat (much more largely eaten by the English
than by the French) is not dearer in England
than in France, where the best cuts of horseflesh
fetch fivepence a pound. The reason of this
great power of meat consumption in Great
Britain is to be found in the fact that we grow
meat, while in France and Germany, with the
exception of limited areas which grow beef for
England and Paris, they allow skin, bone, meat,
and muscle to exist for the purposes of the dairy
or harness, or both combined.

It may be assumed that every head of horned
stock included in our statistical returns is either
a dairy cow or a beef-making animal, and that
on an average it produces twice as .much of
the best joints of beef as the French animal,
because it comes to the butcher at half the age,
and fattened, thanks to root and cake, on one-
fourth of the area. Normandy and Brittany
have recently sent us a few short-horn crosses,
equal to those from Warwickshire or Yorkshire.
The balance in weight and quality of British
sheep and pigs, taking early maturity into
consideration, is still greater. We have no doubt
that the ordinary cultivated acreage of England
and Scotland produces four times as much beef,
mutton, and pork, annually, as the same acreage
in France or Germany, excepting always the
exceptionally well cultivated farms in Prussia,
equal to and exceeding in extent our greatest
West Norfolk farms.

We have it on the high authority of M.
Le Play, the chief commissioner of the French
Exhibition, that the efforts of the French