that Mr. Tanner and Baron
Liebig coincided in believing small lungs necessary to rapid fattening;
but in another part of his essay, Tanner thus describes one of the
points indicative of a tendency to fatten early:--"The chest should be
bold and prominent, wide and deep, furnished with a deep but not coarse
dewlap." On comparing the two passages which I have quoted from Tanner's
essay, a contradiction is apparent. Mr. Bowly, Major Rudd, and other
eminent breeders and feeders, appear to regard a capacious chest as the
best sign of a fattening property which an animal could show. Lawes and
Gilbert have recorded the weights of the viscera of a number of animals
which, though supplied with equal quantities of the same kind of food,
attained to different degrees of fatness. On carefully scrutinising
these records, I failed to perceive any constant relation between the
weight of their lungs and their tendency to fatten rapidly. Some animals
with large lungs converted a larger proportion of their food into meat
than others with smaller respiratory organs, and _vice versa_. In a
state of nature, there is no doubt but that the lungs of the ox and of
the sheep are moderately large; and it is evident that in their case, as
well as in that of man, over-feeding and confinement tend to diminish
their muscular energy, and, of course, to decrease the capacity of the
lungs. That such a practice does not tend to the improvement of the
health of an animal is perfectly evident, but then the perfect ox of
nature is very different from the perfect ox of man. The latter is
a wide departure from the original type of its species: any marked
development of its nervous system is undesirable; and it is valuable
in proportion as its purely vegetative functions are most strongly
manifested. A young bullock, therefore, of this kind would, no doubt,
be the most economical kind to rear, provided that it was perfectly
healthy, and capable of assimilating the liberal amount of food supplied
to it. But it rarely happens that a young animal with a weakly chest
turns out other than a scrofulous or otherwise diseased adult. On the
whole, then, I am disposed to believe that whilst naturally small-lunged
species may be more prone to fatten than large-chested ones, it is not
the case that small-chested individuals fatten more rapidly than larger
lunged individuals of the same kind.

The conditions under which oxen, sheep, and pigs have been so long
maintained in