The evolution of British cattle and the fashioning of breeds/The Norse Contingent

by James Wilson

V

THE NORSE CONTINGENT

Had 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 confirmatory evidence afforded by Mendelian researches 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 such as being hornless, etc., have appeared suddenly from what we may call a spontaneous variation,"^[1] and "No one can give any explanation—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 inherited. 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."^[2]

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

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; "^[3] 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. This country is of green and passing fresh hucy pleasantly replenished with Orchards, Gardens, and Groves: thus he described it above six hundred years since, and now we find as he hath said; to which we may add their gain from the Pail; "^[4] 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 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."^[5]

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 profit, though not for beauty, I think, with the most intelligent Mr. Young, there is not so valuable a breed in England) by a Derbyshire black-and-white bull^[6] 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 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."^[7] It has been shown recently^[8] 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."^[9]

By Low's time the Suffolks had extended to "Norfolk, Cambridge, and apart of Essex,"^[10] 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."^[11] 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 these cattle penetrated far inland. Tuke^[12] 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 Holderness. It is doubtful, however, if their numbers ever were large. Lawrence^[13] 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^[14] 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 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."^[15]

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,"^[16] 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! But, "the horns were made this time of lead, lest she should ever again be reduced to the condition of a polled beast."^[17]

The Durham dun cow
	[From Hutchinson's "History of Durham."

The Angus Doddies and the Buchan Humlies.—The hornless cattle of Forfarshire and Aberdeenshire may be considered together because their histories are parallel, and because,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, 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. Macdonald 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 cattle, with a smaller number of Longhorns and Longhorn grades or crosses. Latterly, Shorthorns 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^[18] 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, 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, however, their milk was thinner than that from the small cows."^[19]

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 general colour is yellow, comprehending the brindled, dark red and silver-coloured yellow."^[20] 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."^[21] 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."^[22] Macdonald and Sinclair tell us that "Formerly, both in Angus and Aberdeen, the breed^[23] 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.'"^[24] 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 dun is not disliked. Pure white or streaked are counted inferior."^[25]

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, hornlessness 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, "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 £2 10s. to £3 per head. These are frequently without horns, and both they and the horses are very small."^[26] According to Youatt, the native cattle of Sutherland were very small: "much smaller than those of Caithness."^[27] Their colour is not mentioned, but a correspondent of Youatt's wrote him that the cattle in the neighbouring county, Ross, "are of all colours, but black and brindled predominate."^[28]

The Skye Polls.—We know that at one time there were polled cattle in Skye just as we know 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 humble 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,^[29] 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."^[30] 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 neighbouring islands than among those of the mainland; and an inspection of the foundation entries in the "Highland Herd Book" indicates that at one time these colours were of more frequent 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 brandered, that is a mixture of red and brown in stripes—brindled. A whitish dun^[31] colour is also pretty frequently seen."^[32]

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."^[33] 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 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."^[34] 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.'^[35]

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."^[36] 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 systematic attempt to breed them pure unless by a very few owners of small herds, their extinction 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 had a 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 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 mentioned 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 recorded 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: "^[37]— a black hummle, i.e. humble, i.e. hornless ox, valued at 40^. Zd. 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 Morayshire, which was a Norse or Danish stronghold. 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."^[38] And there is evidence of hornless cattle in Ireland as early as the ninth or the tenth century. In a crannoge near Dunshaughlin, about seventeen miles north-west of Dublin, a considerable number of hornless and other skulls was unearthed in the middle of last century. Some of these are now in the National Museum in Dublin, and one of them is figured here. Sir William Wilde was able to fix the crannoge's range of date at from 848 to 933 A.D.

Hornless skull, from the Dunshaughlin crannoge.
	[Drawn from a specimen in the Dublin National Museum.

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 considerations. 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 archaeologists, 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 somewhere 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 importations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 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 Norsemen and the Normans. The latter we know to have consisted entirely of the nobility and 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 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."^[39] 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."^[40]

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 Scandinavian 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,^[41] "they are found chiefly in Northern Europe, in North Russia, Finnland, Lappland, Sweden, Jemtland, Norway and Iceland." Mittendorff,^[42] 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 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 (Fjåll) race are taken from Sundbärg'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.D. 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, that they are not of the Norse race, and the recent discovery of hornless skulls at Newstead, an old Roman centre in Berwickshire, and referred to by Professor Cossar Ewart in the article "Cattle " in the Standard Cyclopædia of Agriculture, points to their having come from the south of Europe with the Romans.

Swedish Fjåll cow.
	[From Sundbärg's "Sweden."

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.
3. Gibson's edition, 1750, p. 437.
4. "Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain," 1676, page 33.
5. Quoted from Youatt's "Cattle," 1834, p. 174.
6. A horned breed.
7. Vol. iii., second edition, 1788, p. 280.
8. Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, vol. xii.. No. 8, "The Colours of Highland Cattle."
9. Second edition, 1794, p. 66.
10. "Domesticated Animals," p. 322.
11. "Youatt," 1834, p. 175.
12. "Agriculture of the North Riding of Yorkshire," 1800.
13. "General Treatise on Cattle," etc., 1805, p. 71.
14. "Agriculture of the East Riding of Yorkshire," 1812.
15. Quoted in Bates's "Thomas Bates and the Kirklevington Shorthorns," 1897, p. 45.
16. 1785-1794, vol. ii. p. 226.
17. "Thomas Bates and the Kirklevington Shorthorns," 1897, p. 46.
18. That is, East Aberdeenshire.
19. "History of Polled Aberdeen or Angus Cattle," p. 72.
20. "Cattle," p. 167.
21. Ibid., p. 114.
22. Ibid., p. 106.
23. I.e. the polled breed.
24. "Polled Aberdeen and Angus Cattle," p. 76.
25. "Transactions of the Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland for 1906," p. 204.
26. "Tour in Scotland," third edition, 1774, vol. i. p. 170.
27. "Cattle," p. 93.
28. Ibid., p. 97.
29. Just as the Aberdeenshire men, who desired hornless calves, used hornless bulls, the Skye men, who desired horned calves, used horned bulls.
30. Johnson's "Collected Works," Dublin, 1793, vol. iv. p. 479.
31. That is apparently what is now called light dun.
32. "Prize Essays and Transactions of the Highland Society."
33. "Observations upon Live Stock," second edition, 1794, p. 69.
34. "General Treatise on Cattle," etc., 1805, p. 71.
35. 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?
36. "Domesticated Animals," p. 350.
37. The Spalding Club's "Collections for a History of the Shires of Aberdeen and Banff," vol. iii. p. 344.
38. Vol. ii., Plate 23.
39. "Letters from Iceland," 1780, p. 132.
40. Youatt's "Cattle," p. 88.
41. "Grundzüge der Naturgeschichte der Haustiere," p. 308.
42. See Landwirtschaftliche Jahrbücher, vol. xvii., 1888, pp. 299, 300.