Daily Richmond Whig

Virginia is justly famed for her race horses; but it has been a matter of surprise to many, that while so much pains and expense have been lavished by her enterprising citizens in procuring the best stocks, and in breeding, rearing, and training that noble animal, they have so much neglected the breeding of other domestic animals, certainly more useful and profitable. I allude particularly to cattle and sheep. These animals are generally degenerating in this state, as they must every where else, when suffered to breed as they are here; and is it not strange that more attention is not paid to improving their breed in a country so suitable as this is for bringing these animals to the highest perfection, and when in the present depressed state of our agriculture, the farmer could turn his attention to nothing more profitable?

Though a bull or ram, of superior breed, should cost ten times as much as one of the common kind from which we now breed, the produce of twenty cows, or ewes, the first season, would pay the cost of the sire in their enhanced value, as the calves and lambs, sold to the butchers, would command a third at least more than the common kind—and if raised, the sheep, with no more care or expense, would yield double or treble the quantity of wool that our common sheep do—the cows would be much larger, and the milk richer, and in greater quantity—and calves raised for beef would weigh double what the common breed do.

In order to put it in the power of enterprising and public spirited individuals, in this part of the country, to procure good stock to raise from, I last year procured two heifers of superior breed to any in the State—one long, the other short horned. I have sold one of them to a gentleman of this city, who has a farm in the neighborhood: the other with two bull calves ten months old, I have yet. I have no suitable place to keep them for breeding, and am disposed to sell them to persons in the neighborhood, who would propagate the stock, for what they have cost me, with the addition only of a fair compensation, for the trouble and expense I have been at.

I have also a Ram of a very superior breed, that I am disposed to part with on the same terms.

I take the liberty of suggesting the propriety of the Corporation purchasing the young bulls and letting them run in the old fields. They could perhaps, in no way, at so small an expense, confer a greater public benefit, and one which it is clearly their province to attend to. There is hardly a village anywhere that is not provided with one or more bulls, at the public expense; and the public authorities of other cities, where cows are permitted to go at large, have considered it their duty to provide those animals. The corporation of Washington City keep one in each of the four wards. Why should not our corporation make the small appropriation necessary for the same purpose?

WM. STEANE,

Victualler, Shockoe Hill Market.