IN-AND-IN BREEDING. 103 



blood. Boston, as every one knows, traces directly through Timo- 

 leon, Sir Archy, Diomed, Florizel, to Herod. Sovereign, also, 

 through Emilius, his sire, has Herod on both lines as his paternal 

 and maternal g.g.g. sire; and Tartar, the sire of Herod, a third 

 time, in one remove yet farther back. Now this would go to jus- 

 tify Stonehenge's opinion that the recurrence to the same original 

 old strains of blood, when such strains have been sufficiently inter- 

 mixed and r3ndered new by other more recent crosses, is not inju- 

 rious, but of great advantage ; and that, on the whole, it is better, 

 cceteris parilus, to do such than to try experiments with extreme 

 out-crosses." 



IN-AND-IN BREEDING. 



WHEN ANY NEW BREED of animals is first introduced into this 

 country, in-and-in breeding (by which is to be understood the pair- 

 ing of relations within the degree of second cousins twice or more 

 in succession) can scarcely be avoided; and hence, when first the 

 value of the Arab was generally recognised, the breeder of the 

 racehorse of those days could not well avoid having recourse to 

 the plan. Thus we find, in the early pages of the Stud-book, con- 

 stant instances of very close in-breeding, often carried to such an 

 extent as to become incestuous. The result was our modern tho- 

 rough-bred ; but it does not follow that because the plan answered 

 in producing that celebrated kind of animal, it will be equally 

 successful in keeping up the breed in its original perfection. In 

 " British Rural Sports," I have given a series of examples of suc- 

 cess resulting from each plan, which I shall not now repeat, merely 

 remarking that the opinion which I formed from an attentive ex- 

 amination of them remains unchanged. This opinion was expressed 

 in the following words : 



" If the whole of the pedigrees to which I have drawn atten- 

 tion are attentively examined, the breeder can have no hesitation 

 in coming to the conclusion, that in-breeding, carried out once or 

 twice, is not only not a bad practice, but is likely to be attended 

 v> ith good results. Let him ask what horses have been the most 

 remarkable of late years as stallions, and, with very few exceptions, 

 he will find they were considerably in-bred. It has been remarked, 

 that the Touchstone and Defence blood almost always hits with the 

 Selim ; but it is forgotten that the one was already crossed with 

 that horse, and the other with his brother Rubens. On the other 

 hand, the Whisker blood in the Colonel has not succeeded so well, 

 it being made up of much crossed and more distinctly related parti- 

 cles, and therefore not hitting with the Selim and Castrel blood, 

 like his cousins, Touchstone and Defence. It has, however, par- 

 tially succeeded when in-bred to the Waxy and Buzzard blood, as 

 in Chatham and Fugleman, who both reunite these three strains. 

 The same applies to Coronation, who unites the Whalebone blood 



