BREEDING 187 



remote, more than it does its own parents; still, other 

 things being equal, both dam and sire are equally liable 

 to transmit some of their own particular peculiarities to 

 their offspring, and stamp their impress upon it. 



In certain of the lowest forms of life it is found that an 

 ancestor reproduces itself with the greatest regularity in the 

 third or fourth generation, but as there is no such guide 

 to assist us in breeding horses the utmost we can do is to 

 select none but true-shaped animals of unimpeachable per- 

 formances to mate together, and then if there is a tendency 

 to throw back on the part of the progeny it must be to a 

 good type. Other qualities, the intellectual and the nervous 

 organisation, are also to some extent hereditary, but seem 

 to be rather dependent upon the immediate sire and dam, 

 especially if they are very closely related to each other, than 

 upon more remote forbears. The doctrine of heredity, 

 however, admits of a simple explanation. The cells which 

 are concerned with the building up of a future creature are 

 termed " Gametes," and when a Gametes cell from each 

 parent meets and fuses with the other, they henceforward 

 form a single cell, the germ of the future body. This new 

 cell, the product of both parents, never afterwards changes 

 in character, and contains only such qualities of each parent 

 as may happen to be stored in the respective cells at the 

 moment of uniting — much as the elements of each exist in 

 the compound when whiskey and soda-water are mixed 

 together. 



The new cell is in future known as a "Zygote," and is 

 not fresh matter, but a continuation of former material. 

 The influence of each parent, thus bestowed, remains 

 constant, being neither subtracted from, nor added to 

 afterwards : and it only remains for environment and 

 education to develop the various traits thus inherited to 

 their fullest extent ; or to allow them to lie dormant if 

 circumstances are not favourable for their development, 

 though they can still be further transmitted to another 

 generation. 



Gregor Mendel, that painstaking, hard-working Austro- 

 Silesian monk, who died in 1884, proved by an exhaustive 



