1094 New York State Breeders' Association 



warded to Dr. David Starr Jordan, to which the following was 

 received : 



" Your favor addressed to Dr. Jordan, has been referred to 

 me for answer in his absence. 



" In the light of the new understanding of the inheritance of 

 the characteristics of animals and plants, hardly any biologist 

 would attempt to predict the outcome of any particular crossing, 

 even of such well-kno^vn animals as horses. The discoveries bv 

 experimental work in hybridization have revealed some very inter- 

 esting and valuable principles, the most conspicuous of which 

 teaches that many animal and plant characteristics seem to be 

 indestructible and unmodifiable. Various characteristics may bo 

 combined by cross-breedings, but they cannot be blended. If they 

 are of such an antithetical nature that they cannot exist together 

 in the same individual, then one member of this pair of opposite 

 characteristics will be suppressed, as far as any expression in the 

 body of the individual is concerned, but it will be represented 

 equally with the other in the germ cells produced by this indi- 

 vidual. While, of course, experimental work has touched only a 

 few of the many so-called unit characteristics that go to compose 

 the personality of animals, yet the similarity in behavior in in- 

 heritance of almost all of these characters that have been ex- 

 perimented with, suggests that many more, probably most animal 

 or plant characteristics, may be relied on to behave in the same 

 way. 



" However, some traits do blend, and one cannot tell just how 

 a given trait in a given kind of animal or plant will behave in 

 inheritance until one has tried it. It may very well be that the 

 crossing you suggest would result in the kind of type that you 

 desire to get, but probably nowhere else in biologic work is the 

 old adage that the ' proof of the pudding is the eating it ' more 

 literally true than in the field of studies in heredity. And as 

 animal breeding depends first and above all else upon heredity, 

 so also must it find the answer to its problems through multiplied 

 experiment. 



" The important thing to keep in mind now-a-days, in cross- 

 breeding, is that you are not mating two distinct but modifiable 

 and fusible personalities, but that you are combining two groups 



