SELECTION OF ANIMALS. 95 



and at the same time raise either himself or his animals up to 

 the standard of good agriculture. It cannot be done. 



This, sir, is the morale of breeding, and lies at the foundation 

 of the whole thing. Once having made up your minds that you 

 are equal to being lords of the animal kingdom, once having 

 established the fact in your own superior consciousness that you 

 are competent to do that business, then you can apply yourselves 

 to the selection of animals for the purposes of breeding, and 

 apply yourselves to the business of procreating those animals, 

 and increasing them upon your farms. How is that to be done ? 

 I have no doubt I shall repeat what I have said before ; I have 

 no doubt I shall be obliged to repeat what has been said this 

 morning ; but if I am taking up the time that others desire to 

 occupy, I will stop in a moment. This matter of selecting 

 animals is the first point. I insist upon it, that no animal 

 should be selected as a breeding animal, which has either sus- 

 tained an injury himself, or whose ancestors have sustained such 

 grave injury that he bears upon himself the slightest mark of it ; 

 because it is perfectly apparent that the inheritance of acquired 

 faculties is almost as certain as the inheritance of natural facul- 

 ties. I do not mean to say that this is a positive rule, but I say 

 that it comes so near being a positive rule that every close 

 observer of animals, every close observer of man, knows that it 

 is as near a rule as you can get. I have not a multitude of facts 

 to sustain the idea that a simple injury would damage a breed- 

 ing animal, but I do know that certain mutilations will be trans- 

 mitted, sometimes not to the damage of the offspring. How is it 

 that the best family of Ayrshire cattle which I myself have ever 

 undertaken to breed, descended from a bull acknowledged to be 

 in many respects, and almost in all respects, the best Ayrshire 

 bull ever brought into this country — how is it, that that whole 

 family of animals carry the mark of their parentage upon the 

 ends of their ears ? The ear of an animal of the bovine species, 

 is generally as evenly rounded as the top of an arch ; but here 

 is a whole family of animals, the ends of whose ears are either 

 square or scolloped, or clipped, precisely as you see them scol- 

 loped or clipped, when they are sent from the farm into the hill 

 pastures of Scotland or England. Where did they get this ? It 

 certainly is not natural. That peculiar characteristic of the ears 

 of these animals must have been caused, not by one clipping, 



