[21] Probably few who have not critically examined the facts regarding close breeding in the improved Short-horns are aware of the extent to which it has been carried. On the 28th of March, 1860, at a sale of Short-horns at Milcote, near Stratford upon Avon (England) thirty-one descendants of a cow called "Charmer," bred of Mr. Colling's purest blood, and praised in the advertisement as "capital milkers and very prolific, _not having been pampered_," sold for L2,140, averaging about $350 each, and many of them were calves. The stock was also praised as "offering to the public as much of the pure blood of 'Favorite' as could be found in any herd." With reference to this sale, which also comprised other stock, the Agricultural Gazette, published a few days previous, had some remarks from which the following is extracted: "It is unquestionable that the ability of a cow or bull to transmit the merit either may possess does in a great degree depend upon its having been inherited by them through a long line of ancestry. Nothing is more remarkable than the way in which the earlier improvers of the Short-horn breed carried out their belief in this. They were indeed driven by the comparative fewness of well bred animals to a repeated use of the same sire on successive generations of his own begetting, while breeders now-a-days have the advantage of fifty different strains and families from which to choose the materials of their herd, but whether it were necessity or choice it is certain that the pedigree of no pure bred Short-horn can be traced without very soon reaching many an illustration of the way in which 'breeding in-and-in' has influenced its character, deepened it, made it permanent, so that it is handed down unimpaired and even strengthened in the hands of the judicious breeder. What an extraordinary influence has thus been exerted by a single bull on the fortunes of the Short-horn breed! There is hardly a single choice pure-bred Short-horn that is not descended from 'Favorite' (252) and not only descended in a single line--but descended in fifty different lines. Take any single animal, and this bull shall occur in a dozen of its preceding generations and repeatedly up to a hundred times! in the animals of some of the more distant generations. His influence is thus so paramount in the breed that one fancies he has created it and that the present character of the whole breed is due the 'accidental' appearance of an animal of extraordinary endowments on the stage in the beginning of the present century. And yet this is not so;--he is himself an illustration of the breeding in-and-in system--his sire and dam having been half brother and sister, both got by 'Foljambe.' And this breeding in-and-in has handed down his influence to the present time in an extraordinary degree. Take for instance, the cow 'Charmer,' from which as will be seen elsewhere, no fewer than thirty-one descendants are to be sold next Wednesday. She