FUR FARMING TO SUPPLY WORLD DEMAND 53 



twenty years, I asked the same question ; and he didn't know. 

 He could only give an opinion ; and he gave it doubtfully. Both 

 men gave the same answer in one respect. You found silver fox 

 pups in the litter of cross fox and of black fox and sometimes, but 

 rarely, in the litter of red fox; but these instances didn't tell you 

 whether the silver fox were a species, or a freak, till you could defi- 

 nitely establish the parentage of both the vixen and the jack, back 

 not one generation but two or three. 



All these disputes have been cleared up by fox farming. What- 

 ever the silver fox was originally, as the Lord made the first silver 

 fox, whether a variation, or a freak, or a species, what the silver 

 fox can be made we now know. He can be made into a registered 

 thoroughbred of his own kind true to breeding as a thoroughbred 

 Holstein, or Ayrshire, or Guernsey, with only such occasional freak 

 throw-backs to ancestry or mixed blood, as the best Holsteins 

 will sometimes show, when ten generations of blacks and whites 

 will surprise themselves by bringing forth a red Holstein. 



Follow the monk, Mendel's laws as to mating sweet peas, mate 

 pure silver fox to a pure silver fox, and don't vary for three genera- 

 tions — above all don't introduce alien blood, whose ancestry you 

 don't know — and true as the clock ticks its rounds, from silver fox 

 you will get only silver foxes after the third generation. The first 

 family may have a cross fox. The second family may have a throw 

 back to a cross fox ; but if you mate only silver to silver, silver you 

 will get after the third generation ; and you will be entitled to 

 register your third generations as thoroughbreds in the registration 

 book of fox farms. 



Registration Book ! 



How the fur hunters of ten years ago would have scoffed at that ! 

 But a lot has happened in the fur world in the last ten years ; and 

 fox farms to-day have begun registration books for thoroughbreds. 

 When you consider that fox farming had been condemned as a 

 failure in the '8o's, and re-condemned and double damned as a 

 failure in the '90's and down as late as 1910, there is really no limit 



