"If we feed a calf, 'on the bucket,' the calf's coat loses its shine and becomes dull. We say it is 'dead.' A couple of days is sufficient to deaden the coat. And it takes three weeks or a month 'on a cow' to get the gloss back. A quart of milk direct from the cow is as good as a gallon of milk out of a bucket.
"We do not attempt to feed our female calves so well as we feed the bulls. It is too costly. Our heifers are put on 'the bucket' when three days old. I buy a cow to rear my bull-calves on. I once reared a bull on 'the bucket' satisfactorily. But I gave him twelve gallons of new milk every day after he was five months old, and kept it up till he was fourteen months. One cow that gives three gallons does a calf just as well as twelve gallons viâ the bucket, and is much cheaper. Some crack bulls have three and four five-gallon cows at once, and go to Shows with all their nurses in attendance.
"Once I reared a bull as we rear the heifers. But he was a failure. His daughters are only half the size they ought to be."
(An example of direct developmental inheritance—in terms of deterioration—from father to daughter.)
XIV
Comparing a calf with a human baby, it becomes self-evident that the diet suited for the large, crude creature which trots about on four legs shortly after birth must be wholly unsuited to the delicate digestion and the subtle psychological needs of the small and complex, highly-organised human infant, which remains so long a helpless infant.
The all-important proteid of every order of creature differs from that of every other. Before any form of alien proteid can be built into the body of a living organism, the digestion and assimilation of this creature must first have laboriously disintegrated and reconstructed it to the form of its own individual proteid.
The Irish tradition that persons not nursed during infancy by their mothers are beings without souls has much to justify it. Even the ill-nourished, sickly babes of working-mothers have an essentially human look in eyes and features, possess far more of nervous power, and are of appreciably higher and more intelligent psychology than are the bottle-fed infants of the cultured.
The bottle-fed start handicapped for life, both in constitution and mentality. It is safe to say that all great men and women have been suckled by their mothers or have come of stock thus humanly nurtured. That they were thus humanly nurtured during their momentous first nine months of life, is the reason, doubtless, why so many of our greatest men have sprung from humble origin.