FOREWORD IX 



be made, he began collecting- material from seemingly pure- 

 bred dogs of various breeds destroyed at the city pound. 

 However, it was soon obvious to him that most of the animals 

 thus obtained were either diseased or too old to be of value 

 for histological studies on the endocrines. 



The experimental study of the problem was made possible 

 through the generosity of the Rockefeller Foundation. In 

 1926 a farm was purchased at Shrub Oak, near Peekskill, 

 N. Y., and pure-bred dogs were obtained. However, unfore- 

 seen difficulties began to arise. Parasitic infections, distemper 

 and unsuspected dietary deficiencies interfered with the ex- 

 periment from the beginning. It was necessary first to over- 

 come these difficulties, a task that took several years and 

 during which Doctor Stockard freely applied the trial and 

 error method in view of the scarcity of data on the subject. 

 This explains to some extent the slowness with which the 

 scientific data began to accumulate, and the consequent delay 

 in writing up the results of the experiment. Moreover, it 

 was found that certain characteristics supposedly dependent 

 on the endocrine constitution of the breeds employed were 

 actually inherited in a Mendelian fashion, a situation that 

 required further breeding- experiments in order to ascertain 

 the ratios in the offspring. The aims and organization of 

 the Cornell Anatomy Farm, as it was called, and the methods 

 followed were described by Doctor Stockard some time ago.* 



In the preparation of the histological material, covering a 

 period of many years, Doctor Stockard was ably assisted by 

 Miss Emilia Vicari and Miss Eugenia Berry, among others. 

 Dr. A. LeRoy Johnson made observations on the dentition 

 of the different breeds and worked out the indices of the 

 skull. The differences in behavior of the diverse breeds and 

 the possibility of studying their inheritance by means of the 

 conditioned reflex method widened the scope of the work at 

 the farm. The results of these experiments, carried out by 



* An experimental dog farm for the study of form and type. The Collecting 

 Net, Woods Hole, vol. 6, pp. 257-264, 1931. 



