INHERITANCE, VARIATION AND SELECTION. 37 



SEX IN TROTTING HORSES. 



Among American trotters the mares are known to be greater 

 performers than the stallions. Helm 27 ranks Hambletonian as 

 the first of the great stallions. Hambletonian was not a trotting 

 stallion and his sire, Abdallah, was neglected and discredited during 

 his lifetime, and it is said he died of starvation. In looking into 

 the ancestry of Hambletonian I find that he was descended from 

 a line of trotting mares, and his record is one of a sire of trotting 

 mares. Goldsmith Maid was his granddaughter, and she had at 

 least two additional trotting mares in her ancestry. I am not able to 

 find, however, that her ancestry included any stallions of fame ex- 

 cept Hambletonian and Abdallah. 



Sedgwick gives the case of a sporting dog, the issue of a set- 

 ter mother and a spaniel father, with a setter bitch, and the male 

 offspring were spaniels like the paternal grandfather, while the 

 female offspring were setters, having the color of their mother. 28 



There are breeds of sheep and goats in which the horns of the 

 males differ greatly from those of the female. These differences, 

 acquired under domestication, are regularly transmitted to the 

 same sex. With cats the tortoise-shell color is usually transmitted 

 to the female only, the males being rusty red. 29 Gout is more often 

 transmitted from father to son than from father to daughter. 30 

 Sanders 31 states that he knows a family residing in Iowa in which 

 the mother and three daughters were destitute of hair, while all 

 of the sons had as much as the average of men. 



(27) American Roadsters, p. 151. 



(28) Quoted by Miles in "Stock Breeding," p. 233. 



(29) Descent of Man, Vol. I, p. 273. 



(30) Ibid., Vol. I, p. 283. 



(31) Horse Breeding, p. 24. 



