cattle have come down to the present day—not, however, without their Bakewell to establish them, and his successors to maintain them in equilibrium.
The Aberdeen- Angus Bakewell was Hugh Watson, the son of farmers and polled cattle breeders on the borders of Forfar and Perth, who, in 1808, at nineteen years of age, got a farm for himself and six of his father's "best and blackest cows, along with a bull, as a nucleus for an Angus doddie herd." Within a month or two he went twenty miles north to Brechin, the great market of those days, and bought "the ten best heifers and the best bull he could procure." And more than half a century later, when his work was done, Hugh Watson's cattle were almost, if not entirely, descended from the cattle he began with in 1808.
How far Watson was driven to the system of in-breeding by force of circumstances, and how far by example, cannot be told; but it must be remembered that, being another unparalleled judge, and having begun his herd with the best he could find, it was afterwards difficult for him to get other cattle as good as his own. It must also be remembered that Charles Colling's Comet was sold for a thousand guineas in the year 1810.
By exhibiting the last three or four generations that led up to Hugh Watson's greatest bull,
