No. 6. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 317 



A Member: It doesn't run clear through? 



DR. GAY: No, it does not hold in all cases, and we don't know 

 yet in w^hich cases it holds and in which it does not; it is a 

 pretty deep subject to attempt. The thing to consider then is 

 whether or not we have an average individual and bear in mind 

 that that horse is transmitting, not his own character but the char- 

 acter of his ancestors behind him. 



A Member: We have a black mare that has a bay colt, just like, 

 in shape and color, the dam of the sire. 



DK. GAY: Well, now, when you get into color in horses, you 

 have got a very wide range of variation to deal with, in the first 

 place, and almost any color will come along. But this much has 

 been proven; the experiment station has issued a bulletin; Mr. A. 

 B. Cox, a breeder of trotters in Philadelphia, has given a great 

 deal of study to this thing and has also done some work along 

 this line and has demonstrated the recessive and dominant char- 

 acter under Mendel's Law that a chestnut color is recessive, and 

 any time you breed a chestnut horse to a chestnut horse, you get 

 a pure chestnut. If you breed a roan to any other color, in nine 

 times out of ten you get a roan. Old Jaybird proves that; two or 

 three generations removed from Old Jaybird, he is a roan because 

 roan is a dominant character and blocks out the other. What I 

 want to impress on you is the fact that we cannot find out all the 

 characters inherent in the individual by looking at him; he does 

 not manifest in his physical make-up everything he has inherited 

 from his ancestors; he only inherits the characters that are domin- 

 ant and has a lot of recessive characters, yet he will transmit them 

 just as regularly to his offspring as the characters he himself mani- 

 fests. How are you going to know, unless you should study their 

 ancestry and see what the foundation blood was and how much 

 it has been modified and see what the breeder himself has had to 

 do not only in improving but in shaping the type? 



My purpose to-night is to show you representatives of the four 

 great draft breeds and to try to point out in those representatives 

 the distinctive characters that each breed posseses by virtue of 

 one or more of the three agencies; and then lead you to see, on 

 account of the fact that he possesses those distinctive characters 

 as a matter of natural consequence in heredity, those are the char- 

 acters he must be expected to transmit. I am not talking about 

 pure breeds except from the sire's point of view; I am talking 

 about the parentage of your pure bred farm horse with your farm 

 mares for market geldings. The first slide I will show you has 

 a lot of statistics which I won't expect you to remember, but 

 there are two or three things. In the first place, it shows the po- 

 sition of Pennsylvania as a horse breeding state. The ten leading 

 horse breeding states are arranged in order. These figures have 

 been compiled by Wayne Dinsmore, Secretary of the Percheron 

 Society of America. Naturally they are colored a little stronger 

 in Percheron figures, but nevertheless the figures don't lie, they 

 are facts. In the first place, you notice what he says at the top, 

 horse breeding shows improvement, the grades are decreasing and 



