ON BREEDING. 205 



Let us understand: Conceding that our point is well taken, 

 there is one grand fundamental condition upon which all progres- 

 sive breeding is founded, viz.: Sound health and constitution in 

 the parents whose produce is sought to be improved. If closely 

 related animals have constitutional disease of any kind, their 

 offspring will inherit it, and interbreeding will intensify the 

 disease in every descending production of the family. Even the 

 out-and-out breeding of unhealthy animals, with healthy sires or 

 dams, will not altogether eradicate the disease inherited, or 

 chronic, as it may be. Unsound, or diseased animals, or those 

 having a tendency to disease or unsoundness, when bred together, 

 no matter how distant their blood relation, their produce will be 

 unsound; and if the disease be apparently checked or oblit- 

 erated in the young stock, it may lie dormant for a time, and 

 then break out in their descendants in all its original virulence, 

 as seen in their ancestors of some generations back. Diseased 

 animals should never be used in either progressive or any other 

 breeding. Also, if barrenness (although barrenness is not prop- 

 erly a disease,) be a constitutional tendency in the first dam, or 

 lack of virility be a constitutional tendency in the first sire, 

 those tendencies may become perpetuated to such degree, by close 

 interbreeding from parents to offspring, or between such offspring, 

 as to finally result in almost total barrenness on both sides, in 

 the entire family. If such tendency increase in the produce, 

 new blood of an opposite tendency must, of course, be intro- 

 duced. But, if the blood of these barrenly inclined animals, 

 otherwise than in that particular fault in either sire or dam, be 

 of great value, they should be coupled with other fruitful ones 

 of different families, possessed in as high degree as possible of 

 the same distinctive^ qualities, sought to be perpetuated through 

 the original parents, so that the same distinct characteristics may 

 be retained in the herd. "Like produces like," is the inexorable 

 law of nature, only departed from, under strange and extraor- 



