100 



disease to us lost its terror. We do not court this enemy, ]y.\{ 

 by the appHcation of strict quarantine prevent it, or hold it 

 to a particular field or pen. A neighbor, his dog, or horse, or 

 vehicle, from a cholera farm would be as little welcome at our 

 farm, as would a leper at our residence. 



I am proud to know that Illinois has now a better method 

 of preventing great loss from cholera, in the immunization now 

 being directed by Dr. Peters, and which has been so well es- 

 tablished by Dr. Connaway of Missouri. 



The isolated farmer has not the "atmosphere" that you men 

 of the universities have, and you will laugh at our modes for 

 research and inspiration, but when we looked thru the libraries 

 for laws and rules and principles governing breeding, we found 

 just one, handed down from Aristotle, the law that like begets 

 like; and it is a lie. 



It seems that most of the research, which during the last 

 half century has changed biology, was instigated in some way 

 by the great truth propounded by Charles Darwin. He and 

 Mendel brought life down from the clouds where thinking men 

 may handle, analyze, and theorize as they do in the exact sciences 

 of dead elements. The sexual principles of Gregor Mendel 

 were the first that were absolutely true in their application to 

 the breeding of plants, animals, and man. They were given 

 before the Society of Brunn in 1865, but lay unnoticed until the 

 spring of 1900, when three papers by DeVries, Correns, and Von 

 Tschermak were published stating again its substance. Each 

 of these three writers was able to confirm Mendel's conclusions 

 from his own cases. 



At this time Spillman was developing these laws in wheat 

 hybrids, and they were almost immediately confirmed by Castle. 

 Bateson, and others with small pet stock. Your writer, on a 

 farm, isloatcd from learning and with little scientific literature, 

 did not hear of these principles until he read an article by 

 Castle in 1904. We had been making a variety of hybrid ex- 

 periments with swine ; using pedigreed animals of strongly con- 

 trasted visual features, partly for determining the economic value 

 of their many mixtures, but chiefly to determine the then mooted 



