444 GENETICS IN RELATION TO AGRICULTURE 



During historical times constant improvement has been made in the 

 material thus provided by the early herds and flocks, a century sometimes 

 sufficing for the establishment of a new breed of very superior excellence. 

 Seemingly these have been remarkable achievements, but we must never 

 forget when we consider them that they have been associated almost 

 invariably, particularly those which have been most striking, with 

 changes in the conditions of life of man himself and the purposes for 

 which he has employed his animals. The Arab, nomadic inhabitant 

 of the desert, needed for his purpose a horse of speed and stamina, a single 

 favorite steed sufficing for each individual. Constant association be- 

 tween master and mount developed in the Arab that high pride in the 

 excellence of his steed, a most commendable characteristic of the desert 

 dwellers of Arabia. We find, therefore, that the horses of these peoples 

 are superior in intelligence, stamina, and beauty of form to those of almost 

 any other land; we find them with pedigrees carefully kept and tracing 

 back to the seventeenth century before the Christian era. According 

 to reports of Upton, who lived among the Anezah Bedouins, famed even 

 among the Arabs for the superior excellence of their horses, no animal 

 was recognized as pure bred which did not trace back to the five mares Al 

 Khamseh of Sheik Salaman; and the descendants of these five mares 

 are divided and sub-divided into an intricate system of families and sub- 

 families. But the modern French farmer with a settled mode of life 

 needed horses for different purposes, primarily for drawing implements 

 of tillage. Accordingly he took horses of the old draft type, large, 

 rawboned, and heavy of weight, but not high in quality or energetic 

 in disposition and crossed them with Arabians, Barbs, and Danish horses; 

 and it was not long before all the neighboring regions of France and Ger- 

 many were demanding horses from La Perche. No long period of im- 

 provement was necessary for the establishment of the Percheron breed; 

 the excellent qualities which it possessed were contained within the old 

 breeds which existed at that time; the improvement was merely a re- 

 arrangement and blending of existing qualities in a form to meet the par- 

 ticular demand of modern rural conditions. Such a breed would have been 

 of doubtful value to the barbaric races which swarmed over Europe 

 over a thousand years ago, but for the life that those races lead today, it 

 and other breeds possessing similar utilitarian advantages are performing 

 a tremendous agricultural service. It would be possible to recount 

 similar cases of breed improvement in all kinds of domestic animals. 

 Fundamentally practically all these instances agree in this respect that 

 when breeds have been established within a relatively short period of 

 time, potentialities have been made use of which already existed in the 

 foundation stock. Translated into the more precise terms of genetics 

 this statement would imply that the hereditary material of modern 



