Page:The Evolution of British Cattle.djvu/53

 the Longhorn and the Shorthorn. These in succession swept out many of the old local breeds and occupied their ground instead; and thus, where, say, the Longhorn was found in 1775, a totally different breed would have been found a hundred years before. What these other breeds were we can infer from the undisplaced breeds around them, and, if possible, find confirmation elsewhere. For example, the Longhorn came into prominence in the English Midlands in the first half of the eighteenth century, and spread gradually southwards as well as in other directions like a rising lake, submerging, as it were, all the existing breeds excepting those that stood high upon the banks around. The southern unsubmerged breeds, with one exception, to which we shall refer later, had many characters in common, but one in particular, that they were all red. Similarly the unsubmerged northern cattle were all black. There is no difficulty in showing that the cattle in Scotland and the North of England were black two centuries ago, for, it will be found from the agricultural and statistical surveys published at the instance of the first Board of Agriculture that they were black at a date still later, while two quotations from Gervaise Markham will show that towards the end of the seventeenth century the black race reached south into England as far as a line drawn approximately from Staffordshire to Yorkshire: "As touching