34 BRITISH DAIRYING. 



Improving Breeds. 



The question of heredity, which is epitomised in the word 

 " pedigree," is of the greatest possible importance in the art of 

 breeding improved animals of any kind. Heredity includes 

 good and bad qualities alike, which are transmitted from parent 

 to offspring, and the art of breeding consists quite as much in 

 wiping out bad qualities as in developing good ones. A fault 

 of form, for example, which is hereditary in any given cow, may 

 be improved away by mating her, and also her female offspring 

 through several generations, with bulls bred from families of 

 cows in whom that particular fault does not occur. Faults, too, 

 of colour, of constitution, of size, of bone, of milking properties, 

 or of almost anything else, save perhaps of actual and positive 

 organic disease, may similarly be disestablished by breeding 

 against them through several generations. But at the same 

 time it must be borne in mind that while these faults cannot be 

 considered as having been finally eradicated until three or four 

 generations have shown no tendency to revert to them, it is only 

 too easy to reintroduce them by using a bull from a herd in 

 which they still exist. 



There is, unfortunately, a tendency of this sort in the 

 animal world a tendency to return to bygone types or 

 peculiarities, many of which, if not all, are undesirable and 

 a breeder cannot be sure that he has completely mastered 

 it until he has seen no evidence of it in the last three or 

 four generations of his cattle; even then it requires to be 

 guarded against just as carefully as it was fought against, in 

 order to prevent its reintroduction. It has been found by 

 Charles Darwin, the greatest naturalist of all time, that cross- 

 breeding gives a more or less definite impulse towards charac- 

 ters long before lost or got rid of; and the introduction of fresh 

 blood, especially if it be entirely unrelated, though of the same 

 species or breed, may be easily followed by the restoration of 

 some earlier and unimproved type. This is the danger which 

 breeders have sought to avoid by " breeding in-and-in," as the 

 constant mating of closely-related animals is termed ; but while 



