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114 BOAED OF AGEICULTURE. 



little Southdown. I bought them for a particular pui'pose, 

 to reduce and improve an old rocky, bushy pasture. I did 

 not buy them for the wool particularly ; that was an inci- 

 dental matter entirely. But while I was reducing and im- 

 proving that pasture by means of those sheep, I thought I 

 might just as well improve the sheep a little, and so I bought 

 as good a Southdown ram as I could get ; I have no doubt he 

 was pure-bred. I put him in with this flock. The next year 

 most of the lambs were so much like Southdowns, so thor- 

 oughly marked, that it would have been difficult to tell them 

 from pure-bred Southdowns. They had all the characteris- 

 tics, so far as you could judge by the eye, of their father, — 

 black feet, black faces, and black legs, etc., — and their wool 

 was very similar. Hardly any of them took after their moth- 

 ers, because their mothers were all grade, or low-bred, com- 

 mon sheep. I do not know that there was one of them that 

 was not very strongly and distinctly marked after the father. 

 Well, suppose any neighbor had come and' wanted to buy a 

 ram to breed from. I could not have recommended one of 

 those lambs, although they looked about as well as their 

 father, but I suppose I might have sold them for pure-bred* 

 Southdowns, they looked so well, but they would have been 

 worth not much more than one-third what their father was as 

 a breeder, simply because they had not that hereditary power 

 accumulated iii their system ; they could not have been de- 

 pended upon at all. They might have transmitted their 

 peculiarities, but the chances were they would not; and that 

 is no way to breed. 



Now, I say that farmers should bear in mind that this 

 hereditary power, which is so valuable and important, and on 

 which our whole improvement must depend, is hidden, latent, ' 

 cannot be detected by the eye. That shows the value of a 

 good pedigree ; Imt not merely a recorded, written pedigree. 

 It must be a full pedigree, such as to guarantee the quality of 

 the ancestry. The pedigree ought to be studied in each case, 

 and in that way, and in that way alone, can we breed with 

 any degree of system, or any degree of certainty in regard to 

 the result. 



I want very much to hear these questions discussed by the 

 practical farmers and dairymen in this section, who, I am 



