Many years ago there were in the Kennebec valley a few polled or hornless cattle. They were not particularly cherished, and gradually diminished in numbers. Mr. Payne Wingate shot the last animal of this breed, (a bull calf or a yearling,) mistaking it in the dark for a bear. During thirty-five years subsequently all the cattle upon his farm had horns, but at the end of that time one of his cows produced a calf which grew up without horns, and Mr. Wingate said it was, in all respects, the exact image of the first bull of the breed brought there. Probably the most familiar exemplification of clearly marked ancestral influence among us, is to be found in the ill-begotten, round-breeched calves occasionally, and not very unfrequently, dropped by cows of the common mixed kind, and which, if killed early, make very blue veal, and if allowed to grow up, become exceedingly profitless and unsatisfactory beasts; the heifers being often sterile, the cows poor milkers, the oxen dull, mulish beasts, yielding flesh of very dark color, ill flavor and destitute of fat. They are known by various names in different localities, in Maine as the "Whitten" and "Peter Waldo" breed, in Massachusetts as "Yorkshire" and "Westminster," in New York as the "Pumpkin buttocks," in England as "_Lyery_" or "_Lyery_ Dutch," &c., &c. Those in northern New England are believed to be descended chiefly from a bull brought from Watervliet, near Albany, New York, more than forty years ago, (in 1818,) by the Shakers at Alfred, in York county, Maine, and afterwards transferred to their brethren in Cumberland county. No one who has proved the worthlessness of these cattle can readily believe that any bull of this sort would have been knowingly kept for service since the first one brought into the State, and yet it is by no means a rare occurrence to find calves dropped at the present time bearing unmistakable evidence of that origin. It seems likely that this disagreeable peculiarity was first brought into the country by means of some of the early importations of Dutch or of the old Durham breed.