464 THE HORSE OF AMERICA. 



tive there from their own loins. The development of this table 

 simply showed an array of sires that were not able to get 2:30 

 trotters, but when their daughters were bred to horses of stronger 

 inheritance, horses indeed that were able to get trotters from 

 almost any kind of mares, they produced foals that came within 

 the circle. This was a grandsire's table and depended upon 

 second causes, that is, the horses that gave it life occupied 

 secondary positions in it, and it presented but little that was of 

 value to the student of horse history. In the discussion of this 

 particular form of heredity the books are filled up with instances 

 of vicious fathers begetting vicious daughters and vicious mothers 

 producing vicious sons, with more or less uncertainty as to the 

 individual origin of the parties in question. 



INDIRECT AND COLLATERAL HEREDITY. When a child or a 

 colt does not resemble its parents, but 'Hakes after" the grand- 

 father or some more remote ancestor, it is said to be a case of 

 atavism, or indirect or collateral heredity. Twenty years ago I 

 visited, by appointment, a branch of my family at the old home- 

 stead of my great-grandfather, on the maternal side. There 

 never had been any knowledge of each other or intercourse be- 

 tween these two branches of the family. On arriving at my 

 destination I was warmly greeted by a gentleman who came for- 

 ward from the crowd and named me. As there were a good 

 number of people alighting from the train at the same time I 

 asked my cousin how he knew me, and he replied that I bore 

 such a striking resemblance to my grandfather that at a single 

 glance he could have picked me out of a hundred men. This 

 grandfather was the father of my mother and he died when I was 

 a small boy. But there was a still greater surprise awaiting me. 

 My kinsman was an intelligent man of excellent sense, and during 

 the few days I spent in his family he was to me a most interest- 

 ing study. In a hundred ways he reminded me of my brother, 

 not in resemblance of face, for there was, practically, no resem- 

 blance; but in the action of his mind, in his way of putting things, 

 and especially in his unstudied and peculiar gestures of his hands 

 in conversation, the one seemed to be a perfect reproduction of 

 the other. They were both born and reared on farms, they were 

 both heads of families, and they were both elders in the Presby- 

 terian church. The one was the third and the other the fourth 

 remove from their common progenitor. I have read carefully 

 descriptions of many cases of mental heredity, but this case, 



