divided, mortgaged. Count de Tourdonnet
in the Révue Contemporaire informs us that
the Normande, the best of the French
breeds, cannot be transplanted, because it
requires better grass than most districts
afford. But, in England, our root-cultivation
has made all countries independent of grass.
This observation is the key-note to the
condition of agriculture in France. For a
hundred years we have been raising our
style of cultivation to keep pace with our
improved live stock. In France we find this leading
agricultural writer asking for cattle able
to sink down to the level of bad cultivation.

Next to the Normandes come the red
Flamande, very like the large white-faced
beast that is the pride of Herefordshire and
Shropshire ; also good dairy cattle, and slow
makers of beef. Then there were the white
Charolais, a picturesque large breed, resembling
Short horns, before fifty years' pains
had given them their present perfect form.
The Charolais give no milk, and not enough
beef, but are bred round the city of Tours
for the plough, and fatted when worn out.
The best we can say of them is, that they are
very improvable, and that, allied with the
Durham John Bull, they will give more milk
more beef and will plough not a whit less
vigorously than the latter.

After the artist's favourites, the white
Charolais, there followed the pretty little
Bretonnes — elegant deer-like creatures, proper
pets for villa paddock, invaluable as the poor
man's one cow, to be fed on roadsides or
bare moor, tethered or watched by a child.
They remind one of the Kerrys in colour and
size ; but are more elegant, and that is the
highest praise they deserve — pretty pets,
out of place where progress is the order of
the day. Then followed a long list of
varieties called after their native provinces,
Gasconne, Garronnaise, Agennaise, such as
we may find in an ancient English cattle
picture-book, published before a few choice
breeds had extinguished local prejudices,
and driven Long horns and polled Norfolks
into the rank of provincial curiosities not
worth cultivating in a national point of view.
Among them were dun and buffalo-
coloured, dark-muzzled, aboriginal-looking
bulls, of a breed, no doubt found by Cæsar
when he invaded Gaul, and used by Charlemagne
in his conquests ; picturesque as the
Schwitz, but giving no spare milk, and even
less beef than the mountaineers. Nevertheless
they are prized for their sturdy draught
qualities, and they may be seen admirably
depicted in the Charcoal Burner's Charette,
painted by Rosa Bonheur.

To follow to the outside tents of the
Exhibition, the sheep and pigs, would be too
tedious and technical a task. There,
electoral Saxony triumphed with her pure
merinos, the result of an hereditary idea, whose
fleece is almost golden in value ; a single pen
of seven sheep was valued at seven thousand
pounds sterling. For a century the reigning
Saxon family have cherished this hereditary
idea of perfecting the merino. There, too,
were specimens of the same breed from the
estates of the Hungarian Esterhazys, — very
good merinos, but the best rams scarcely
averaging more than fifty pounds a-piece
in price. Within sight, were the pens of
the English Southdowns, improved by one
tenant farmer (living on the farm of a
landlord under whom his father and
grandfather had also lived) until he was able, in
Paris, to refuse five hundred pounds for one
ram. It was Esterhazy who, when Coke of
Holkham showed him his breeding flock of
perhaps five hundred ewes, and asked him
how many sheep he had, replied, with
pardonable orientalism, that he did not know
how many sheep he possessed, but that he
had about five hundred shepherds. To the
non-agricultural, the Hungarian prince would
seem to have had the best of the reply;
for, it conveyed the idea of something like
two hundred thousand sheep ; but the
Norfolk flocks are only parts of a great agricultural
machine ; they tread and fertilise land
otherwise barren, prepare the way for great
crops of corn, and yield an annual profit in
meat and wool of something like twenty
shillings each. The Hungarian flocks represent
nothing but great plains of natural
grasses for summer feed, and hay for winter
feed ; on which, as an average, they yield a
profit of something like five shillings a-year
to the owner of the sheep and the land.
Thus we may venture to say that a thousand
Norfolk Southdowns represent more wealth
than ten thousand, and more rent than one
hundred thousand, Hungarian merinos.

As long as sheep were only valuable for their
wool, and only eaten when their four-year-
old teeth had begun to wear out, the merino
travelled steadily northward from Spain even
to Sweden ; attained perfection in Saxony ;
and destroyed the mutton of hundreds of
native breeds. Australian colonisation in
its turn has, within twenty years, however,
destroyed the value of the inferior merino
wool, previously grown by those who
could not give Saxon care and skill to their
flocks ; and now, England exports common
Australian wool to Germany ; importing only
the finest Saxony qualities. At the same
time, the increasing meat consumption created
by steamboats and by railroads makes a
succession of joints pay better than clipping, every
year, two or three pounds of poor wool.
Hence arises a demand for English Dishleys,
Cotswolds, and South-downs, Scotch black-
faces, and Cheviots, to make two-year old,
instead of five-year old mutton, of the foreign
scraggy breeds. Thus it is that emperors,
kings, princes, and princesses give large
prices to our breeders ; but like the lord who
bought Punch and Judy without securing
the services of the showman, unless they
secure a good deal more than rams and ewes,