It is a fact of instructive suggestion, that although Mr. Webb commenced his operations in 1822, he won his first prize for stock ewes at the meeting of the Royal Agricultural Society at Cambridge in 1840.  Here he realised one of the serious disadvantages to which stock-breeders in England are exposed, in “showing” sheep, cattle or swine at these annual exhibitions.  The great outside world, with tastes that lean more to fat sirloins or shoulders than to the better symmetries of animated nature, almost demands that every one of these unfortunate beasts should be offered up as a bloated, blowing sacrifice to those great twin idols of fleshy lust, Tallow and Lard.  If, therefore, a stock-raiser has not decided to drive his Shorthorn cow or Southdown ewe immediately from the Fair-grounds to the butcher’s shambles, he runs an imminent risk of losing entirely the use and value of the animal.  So great is this risk, that much of the stock that would be most useful for exhibition is withheld, and can only be seen by visiting private establishments scattered over the kingdom.  They are too valuable to run the terrible gauntlet of oil-cake, bean and barley-meal, through which they must flounder on in cruel obesity to the prize.  Especially is this the case with breeding animals.  Mr. Webb’s experience at his first trial of the process, will illustrate its tendencies and results.  Of the nine shearling ewes he “fed” for the Cambridge Show, he lost four, and only raised two or three lambs from the rest.  At the Exhibition of 1841, at Liverpool, he won three out of four of the prizes offered by the Royal Agricultural Society for Southdowns, or any other short-woolled sheep; two out of four offered at Bristol, in 1842, and three out of four offered at Derby, in 1843.  But here again he over-fed two of his best sheep, under the inexorable rule of fat, which exercises such despotic sway over these annual competitions, and was obliged to kill them before the show.  It will suffice to show the loss he incurred by this costly homage to Tallow, to give his own words on the subject:—­“I had refused 180 guineas for the hire of the two sheep for the season.  I also quite destroyed the usefulness of two other aged sheep by over-feeding them last year.  Neither of them propogated [sic] through the season, and I have had each of them killed in consequence, which has so completely tired me of overfeeding that I never intend exhibiting another aged ram, unless I greatly alter my mind, or can find out some method of feeding them which will not destroy the animals, and which I have hitherto failed to accomplish.”  The conclusion which he adopted, in view of these liabilities, may be useful to agriculturists in America as well as in England.  He says, “What I intend exhibiting in future will be shearlings only, as I believe they are not so easily injured by extra feeding as aged sheep, partly by being more active, and partly by having more time to put on their extra condition, by which their constitutions are not likely to be so much impaired.”