84 AGRICUVrURi: OF MAINE. 



attainment in breeding has been along pure-bred lines only. 

 A man asked me a while ago what bull he should put on an 

 Ayrshire cow to give her larger teats and more milk. And I 

 said, "An Ayrshire." He thought I had misspoken myself 

 and he asked me again, and I repeated the answer, "An Ayr- 

 shire." Then he said, "I have Ayrshires." I said, "I know 

 you have, stick right to them." If you want to put larger teats 

 on your Ayrshire cows, and want more butter-fat, then get an 

 Ayrshire bull that comes from a family of rich milkers; from 

 a family that have large teats, and the bull itself has large and 

 well-placed rudimentaries ; then you will attain what you want 

 a good deal faster and a good deal surer than by attempting to 

 get it by a cross of some kind. And if you ask me to what 

 place I would go to find poor dairy cattle, I would take you 

 every time to the community where they had started out on 

 this line : A man says he wants more milk, and so he uses for 

 a period of years the Holstein bull, and then he says, "I am 

 not getting rich enough milk," so he gets a Jersey bull. But 

 that does not satisfy because he hears someone talk about the 

 beef cattle, and he says, "I would like to have a little of this 

 strain in mine," so he buys a Shorthorn bull, and when he is 

 through with that combination he has about the most worthless 

 lot of cattle on earth. 



What has been attained by years of careful line-breeding we 

 expect to better by crossing in nine months. There are always 

 two tendencies in our domestic animals, the one is to perpetuate 

 themselves, their characteristics, the other to revert to the 

 original stock. I believe the tendency of reversion is stronger 

 when we take in all this blood that I have mentioned, than 

 when we take animals of no particular breed and combine them. 



Let me give you a concrete illustration. When Darwin wrote 

 his "Origin of Species," in the course of his investigations he 

 became satisfied that all the varieties of pigeons had originated 

 from the Blue Rock pigeon of the Mediterranean Sea. Any 

 one of you who has been to a poultry show, as you pass by 

 the coops will notice varieties as different as can be. There 

 is a pouter pigeon, with its immense crop, and there is a pigeon 

 with its great fan-tail, dissimilar in plumage and make-up and 

 everything else. And yet Darwin contended that they came 

 from the same source. What did he do? He crossed the 

 pouter pigeon and the fan-tail. Neither of them had a blue 



