576 HANDY -BOOK OF HUSBANDRY. 



is : by careful attention to the development of any peculiarity, 

 generation after generation, it may be increased and intensified, 

 and it will be transmitted from father to son with more or less 

 certainty, according to the prominence it has attained. The 

 " thorough-bred " horse (the English race-horse) is the fleetest of 

 the horse family, and has wonderful power of endurance — owing, 

 largely, to the excessive development of his lungs and blood-ves- 

 sels, and to the arrangement of these latter ; the peculiarities are 

 so much a part of the nature of this horse, that they are not only 

 observable in all thorough-bred horses and mares, but, to a great 

 extent, in the progeny of thorough-bred sires with common dams. 

 The Short-horn has a tendency to lay on fat that has" been devel- 

 oped (and fixed as the leading characteristic of the herd) by many 

 generations of breeding for a specific purpose. The Jersey cow is 

 a butter producer — and nothing else — because, for generations, she 

 has been kept only for butter-making. It would be possible to 

 start with a herd of fat Short-horns and in time to make them 

 lean butter producers ; or to breed a herd of Jerseys to the size 

 and amplitude of the Short-horn. 



7. Our success in any branch of stock-raising or feeding will 

 depend, very much, on the skill with which we adapt our food 

 and our management to the special characteristics of the particular 

 breed of animals we keep. Nothing should be done that has a 

 tendency to divert the animal's organic activities from the chan- 

 nel in which they have learned to flow : — for instance, we must 

 not work the bulls of our dairy breeds of cattle, for work will 

 develop the breathing apparatus, and increased breathing will 

 consume, in the production of heat, fat-forming material which 

 should have gone to the increase of cream. This is only a 

 single illustration of a universal principle, which I can here treat 

 only thus meagerly. It underlies the whole question of the 

 domestication of the animals which have become useful to man, 

 and may be roundly stated thus: — The difference between our 

 domestic animals and their wild ancestors is a difference of devel- 

 opment ; and this development is entirely within the control of 

 the farmer. He may allow his flocks and herds to retrograde 



