22 Journal of Agricultural Research voi. xv. no. i 



descriptions of the crossbreds and their parents furnish the material for 

 the objects for our preliminary study — 



(i) To determine the inheritance of the following color characters: 

 Body colors oi the dairy cattle, red, white, yellow, fawn (in its various 

 shades), and black; the white markings, muzzle and tongue pigment, 

 and switch color. 



(2) To determine the mode of inheritance of the polled character. 



(3) To determine the inheritance of the body and breed type in the 

 first generation. 



(4) To determine whether quantity and quality of milk are characters 

 which exhibit dominance and segregation. 



EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 



INHERITANCE OF COLOR CHARACTERS 



Body Color 



The summary of the data for the individual description is tabulated 

 as follows: The offspring of a given bull are given under the name of 

 the bull. The description of the mating consists of, first, the description 

 of the character studied in the given bull and the description of this same 

 character in the dam. Following these parental descriptions are given 

 the description and number of a given kind of offspring resulting from 

 a given mating. This same scheme of tabulation of the results is used 

 for all characters studied in the paper. The term "solid color" is used 

 in the following sense: In speaking of the general body color of an 

 animal it meaps that that animal has no white markings whatsoever. 

 In speaking of a given part of the animal, as the face, it means that this 

 part has no white markings, although white may occur in other places 

 throughout the coat. The term "color" is considered to be the ground 

 color of the body and not the white spottings. With these lew d ^finitions 

 made clear the consideration of the data on the behavior of the coat color 

 in inheritance for our crossbred herd may be taken up (Table VII). 



Table VII shows that black body color is dominant to all other colors, 

 red, brown, and fawn. Two interesting cases of segregation occur. The 

 deep-orange-coated bull and the dark-fa\\'n heifer are shown to come 

 from matings of black F^ parents. These cases are too few to base any 

 definite conclusions as to the mnnber of factors in coat-color inheritance, 

 but what they do indicate is that there is a particular inheritance and 

 not a blending one. 



These conclusions art in line with the general experiences of those who 

 have bred black cattle and fawn or red colored animals together. 

 Spillman {41) showed that the progeny of F^ hybrids of black on red 

 cattle behaved in Mendelian fashion with red recessive. This conclu- 

 sion was further emphasized by the crosses made of the Hereford on 

 Aberdeen-Angus by Boyd {10), in which he showed that this black of 



