the half-breed crossed with Scotch and Devon, for veal and beef of fine quality." Here, as generally throughout Herts, the Suffolk cows were regarded as the best milkers. He also states that "Lord Grimston has the Spotted Polled breed from Mr. Mundy, of Derbyshire, and approves of the sort greatly." These Derbyshire Spotted Polls may have been descendants of the white wild cattle of that district of which Mr. Storer' speaks.

Among Herefords and Short-horns.-Mr. William Housman, the well-known English authority on live-stock matters, has written:

"I know at the present moment, in a Hereford family, a registered pedigree and of high reputation in the show-yard, a heifer with only scurs, as the modified horns sometimes found in polled cattle, and in cross-bred offspring of polled and horned breeds, are called in Scotland. They are little bits of flat horn, loose at the roots, so that you can twist them about, and quite hidden in a mass of hair, continued from a thick, long tuft, which grows upon a pointed crown-ridge, and falls over the forehead and sides of the head; and I have seen similar 'scurs' and top-knots on several female short-horns. In the case of all the short-horns which had them, I was enabled to trace descent, in some cases many descents, from 'grandson of Bolingbroke,' who was also the grandson of a polled and Galloway cow. In the single case of the Hereford I cannot trace any alien blood; but the pedigree is not a long one. Unless we take for granted an inseparable correlation of sugar-loaf skull and tufted head with the lack of horns, we can scarcely suppose these cases to be original sports. The thick top-knot and the pointed ridge of the skull would seem to bear evidence of a polled ancestor, to whose peculiarities, in other particulars than the mere absence of horns, the animal reverts."

Mr. A. B. Allen, of New York, the well-known authority, commenting on Mr. Housman's remarks, said,—

"I have seen an occasional superb specimen of what might be called a muley short-horn in Northumberland, England. There are thousands upon thousands of polled cows already in the United States."

The late Charles Stevenson, who was a juror at the 1857 Paris International Exhibition, states that one bull was exhibited in the aged short-horn class, color white, whose head was adorned with small round knobs, not exceeding two inches in diameter.

Wild White Cattle of Great Britain.

2 National Live Stock Journal, October, 1882.

We have occasionally seen females of the short-horn breed with horns descending by the side of the head, and apparently not very firmly attached to the skull."

These facts should encourage short-horn breeders in their desire to raise an improved breed of polled short-horns.

Shakespeare was acquainted with the polled cattle. One would not have expected Shakespeare to have noted the polled character, nor in the manner he does; but the lover of sport in the forest supplies us with the following:

"Beat. Too curst is more than curst; I shall lessen God's sending that way, for it is said, God sends a curst cow short horns: but a cow too curst he sends none. "Leon. So, by being too curst, God will send you no horns."

This is rather a different attributive explanation than has generally been given.

Shelley is also another "famous writer" who seems to have been acquainted with hornless cattle; and later, Mr. Rider Haggard is acquainted with hornless oxen and goats.

In Wales.-Pennant says,

"Our native kind [of cattle], such as the Welsh and Scottish, are small and often hornless."

Wirt Sikes, a United States consul in Britain, gives a Welsh fairy legend,3 in which there is evidently a reference to polled cattle:

"According to a legend current in Carmarthenshire, there was in days gone by a band of elfin ladies who used to haunt a lake in the neighborhood of Aberdovey. They usually appeared at dusk, clad in green, accompanied by their milk-white hounds and their droves of beautiful white kine. One day an old farmer had the good luck to catch one of these mystic cows, which had fallen in love with the cattle of his herd. From that day the farmer's fortune was made. Such calves, such milk, such butter and cheese as came from the milk-white cow had never been seen in Wales before. The farmer, therefore, soon became rich, and the owner of vast herds. One day, however, he took it into his head that the elfin cow was getting old, and that he had better fatten her for market. On the day appointed for its slaughter people came from all sides to see this wonderful animal; but as the butcher's bludgeon was severing its head a fearful shriek re

* Much Ado About Nothing.-Act II., Scene 1.
2 IIistory of Quadrupeds.

3 British Goblins.

sounded through the air, and the astonished assemblage beheld a green lady crying with a loud voice,

'Come, yellow anvil, stray horns,

Speckled one of the lake,

And of the hornless Dodin,
Arise, come home.'

Whereupon not only did the elfin cow arise and go home, but all her progeny went with her, disappearing in the air over the hill-tops. Only one cow remained of all the farmer's herds, and, lo! she had turned from milky-white to raven-black. The farmer, in a fit of despair, drowned himself, and the black cow became the progenitor of the existing race of Welsh black cattle."

In Ireland—the Bogs.—Sir W. R. Wilde, M.D., has given some valuable details of the breeds of cattle of Ireland. He read a paper in 1858, published (1862) in vol. vii. of the "Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy," entitled "On the Ancient and Modern Races of Oxen in Ireland." From it I quote as much as may be of interest:

"The animal-remains discovered in the great crannoge of Lagore, near Dunshaughin, county of Meath,-the first of the caverns or lake-fortresses which have been discovered during the last twenty years. The range of date of that crannoge has been fixed from A.D. 843 to 933. From these localities, as well as in deep cuttings made for the same purpose, and in peat-bogs, etc., other specimens of bovine remains have been deposited in the museum. I have selected twenty heads of ancient oxen, and arranged them in four rows, each row characteristic of a peculiar race or breed,-viz., the straight-horned, the curved- or middlehorned, the short-horned, and the hornless or maol, all of which existed in Ireland in the early period to which I have already alluded.

"According to my own observations, we possessed four native breeds about twenty-five years ago. First, the old Irish cow, of small stature, long in the back, and with moderate-sized, widespreading, slightly elevated, and projecting horns; they could. scarcely be called long-horned, and they certainly were not short-horned. Their color was principally black and red. . . . Second, the Kerry, which is somewhat more of a middle-horn. Color, red, black, or brindled. . . . Third, the Irish long-horned, similar to, but not identical with, the Lancashire or Craven. The fourth is the Maol or Moyle, the polled or hornless breed, similar to the Angus of the neighboring kingdom; called Myleen in Connaught, Mael in Munster, and Mwool in Ulster. In size they were inferior to the foregoing, although larger than the

Kerry, or even the old crook-horned Irish, but were comparatively few in numbers. In color they were either dun, black, or white, but very rarely mottled. They were not bad milkers, were remarkably docile, and were consequently much used for draught and ploughing."

Describing each set of skulls corresponding to the above, of the polled Sir W. R. Wilde says,—

"The last is the Maol, or hornless, which differs so little from its living representative of the present day that it is unnecessary to describe it. From the five specimens placed before the academy, it is evident that it was much smaller than the modern breed. One head differs from another only in the amount of the occipital projection. The average length of the face is about seventeen inches, and eight inches across the orbits."

In a paper in the same volume, "Upon the Unmanufactured Animal Remains belonging to the Academy," Sir W. R. Wilde gives "a list of fifty-two ox-crania now in the museum."

FIG. 19.

"Nos. 48 to 55 are eight hornless, or maohl, varieties, and all except the two first present a very remarkable protuberance, a frontal crest, but this is especially marked in Nos. 50 and 53As the maohl ox would appear to have abounded in Ireland more than in any other part of Europe, I subjoin the accompanying illustration of this hornless variety, which may be taken as affording a good idea of its general characters. It was accidentally omitted in my communication upon the Ancient and Modern Races of Oxen in Ireland.'" (Fig. 19.)

I am tempted to add the following, from Sir W. R. Wilde's first paper, referring to the state of the best breed in Ireland in olden times:

"The relics of our ancient oxen are not only abundant and interesting to naturalists, but are exceedingly curious in an historical point of view, as they afford undeniable evidence that, so far back as the eighth or tenth century at the latest, we had in Ireland a breed of cattle which, for beauty of head and shortness of horn, might

vie with some of the best modern improved races so much admired by stock-masters, and which are now being reintroduced from England."

Low and Youatt have long notes on this Irish breed:

"It is a variety scarcely known to the breeders of England, · but which, from its properties, deserved far more attention on the part of the community where it has been naturalized. It has existed in Ireland from an unknown period, and appears to have been once widely diffused. It is now scattered throughout the country, and is only found in some numbers in the Vale of Shannon. They were of a light brownish color. They are superior in size to the Suffolk Duns, and equalling in this respect the larger class of short-horns. The breed has probably been formed by an early mixture of Dutch cattle with some of the native races. Had attention been directed to it at an early period, Ireland would have possessed a true dairy breed, not surpassed by any in the kingdom."

Of this ancient polled Irish breed the authors of the "History of Polled Aberdeen or Angus Cattle" quote from the Irish Farmer's Gazette in one of its August numbers, 1847:

'A relative of our own, deceased a few years ago at the age of one hundred and fourteen, had polled cattle in Ireland, and stated that the same breed had been in possession of his great-grandfather some two hundred years before our informant was born. These cattle were chiefly black, and black and white on the back; occasionally red, and brindled with white stripes; in some cases all white but the ears, which were red; and he believed there was never any intermixture of English or Scotch blood among them for the period he alluded to. They possessed the characters of being great milkers and good butter-producers."

Large importations of these Irish polled cattle arrived as late as 1750 at Port Patrick, in Scotland, and met a ready sale.

So late as 1826 these Irish polls seem to have existed. Andrew Henderson, son of one of the most extensive and spirited farmers of Dumfries-shire, thus writes of them ("The Practical Grazier," 1826):

"Several black or dark-colored ones are to be found, which, when brought to Dumfries market, are readily bought up by the Anandale jobbers, who soon convert them into Galloway cattle by mixing them with such lots and passing their word and honor as to the purity of the whole."