TABOO AND GENETICS 33 



by the breeding of domestic animals in the still 

 more recent past. Attention has been focused 

 on a few great males. For example, the breed 

 of American trotting horses all goes back to one 

 sire — Hambletonian 10. The great Orloff Stud 

 Book, registering over a milhon individuals, is 

 in the beginning founded on a single horse — a 

 male. It is not strange that we still find among 

 some breeders vestiges of the ancient behef 

 that the male predominates in inheritance. A 

 superior male can impress his characters in a 

 single year upon 100 times as 7nany colts as a 

 female of equal quaUty could produce in her 

 Hfetime. So slight an incident in his hfe is this 

 reproductive process for each individual that he 

 could if he devoted his hfe solely to reproduction 

 stamp his characters upon a thousand times as 

 many colts as could a female. Thus under 

 artificial breeding conditions, the good males do 

 have a tremendously disproportionate share 

 in improving the whole breed of horses, though 

 each single horse gets his quahties equally from 

 his male and female parents. 



Though Mendel knew an astonishing amount 

 about inheritance a half-century ago, it is worth 

 noting that the foundation upon which rests our 

 present knowledge of sex has been discovered 

 less than twenty years before — the reference 

 is, of course, to the chromosomes as the carriers 

 of inheritance. While from the standpoint of 



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