ome into the world, than the milk
should flow in abundance into the members with which the mother is
supplied for the secretion of that nutritious fluid. By a wonderful
instinct of Nature, too, the young animal, almost as soon as it has come
into life, searches for the teat, and knows perfectly, at the first,
how, by the process of suction, it will be able to extract the fluid
necessary to its existence.

589. IN THE GENERAL ECONOMY OF NATURE, this class of animals seems
destined to preserve a constant equilibrium in the number of animated
beings that hold their existence on the surface of the earth. To man
they are immediately useful in various ways. Some of their bodies afford
him food, their skin shoes, and their fleece clothes. Some of them unite
with him in participating the dangers of combat with an enemy, and
others assist him in the chase, in exterminating wilder sorts, or
banishing them from the haunts of civilization. Many, indeed, are
injurious to him; but most of them, in some shape or other, he turns to
his service. Of these there is none he has made more subservient to his
purposes than the common ox, of which there is scarcely a part that he
has not been able to convert into some useful purpose. Of the horns he
makes drinking-vessels, knife-handles, combs, and boxes; and when they
are softened by means of boiling water, he fashions them into
transparent plates for lanterns. This invention is ascribed to King
Alfred, who is said to have been the first to use them to preserve his
candle time-measures from the wind. Glue is made of the cartilages,
gristles, and the finer pieces of the parings and cuttings of the hides.
Their bone is a cheap substitute for ivory. The thinnest of the
calf-skins are manufactured into vellum. Their blood is made the basis
of Prussian blue, and saddlers use a fine sort of thread prepared from
their sinews. The hair is used in various valuable manufactures; the
suet, fat, and tallow, are moulded into candles; and the milk and cream
of the cow yield butter and cheese. Thus is every part of this animal
valuable to man, who has spared no pains to bring it to the highest
state of perfection.

[Illustration: SHORT-HORN COW.]

[Illustration: SHORT-HORN BULL.]

590. AMONG THE VARIOUS BREEDS OF THE OX, upon which man has bestowed his
highest powers of culture, there is now none takes a higher place than
that known by the name of Short-Horns. From the earliest ages, Great
Britain has