Executed in the same year of the draughtsman’s life we have another group, drawn on the same plate with the above-named studies of animals. This is a bovine family. Maternity itself appears in the shape of a stumpy-footed cow; fatherhood, in the portly figure of a bull whose knit brows and self-satisfied look about his chaps, his broad bowed neck and vast chest, are honoured by imitation in the little bull-calf which reclines before its parents, ruminating, if not meditating, and “the picture of his father.” Produced at about the same period as the last is an admirable etching of a cow and bull-calf. The former, by the leanness of her haunches and flanks, shows the stress of the debt of milk she is paying to the latter, or to the more exacting pail: on her back a ridge of spines is distinct; large aspiring promontories of bone crop up in the rearward regions of the milky mother, not unlike, in their ruggedness and the slopes which form their sides, the steep forms of granite mountains as they are thrust through sedimentary deposits of a later date. At her feet lies the blunt-nosed bull-calf of her heart. Next, in the same collection, and said to be of still earlier origin, comes a much larger production, etched by Mr. Thomas Landseer from a drawing by his brother, our subject. This noble plate represents an Alpine mastiff of the great St. Bernard breed, which had been in the second decade of this century imported to this country by a gentleman of Liverpool.[17] [Illustration: _The Common in Winter._] An inscription at the foot of the plate informs us that, at a year old, this magnificent creature was six feet four inches long; and, at the middle of his back, stood two feet seven inches in height. The note in question adds that the animals of this breed are employed by the fraternity of Mont St. Bernard, not only in the rescue of travellers from snowdrifts, in which the latter may have been engulfed, but as beasts of burthen, and that they are capable of carrying a hundredweight of provisions from the town on which the monks rely, to the hospice, a distance of eighteen miles. The drawing was done by Sir Edwin Landseer when he was about thirteen years of age, that is, in the year 1815.