HANDING DOWN. 267 



G48. — It is evident that in the ordinary course of breeding 

 the character of any extraordinary progenitor must soon be lost. 

 His son is only half his blood, and if the other half is entirely 

 foreign, he has probably lost all power of transmission already. 

 His grandson has only a quarter, his great grandson only one 

 eighth, the next remove one sixteenth, the next one thirty second, 

 and so on. The extraordinary blood is lost, and may never be 

 picked np again. 



649. — On the other hand, by breeding in and in we can 

 preserve the rare blood, and the rare qualiMes, and hand them 

 down, little impaired, to millions of descendants. Thus the 

 carefully inbred pedigree shorthorns, have stocked England and 

 her Colonies, with the descendants of that bull that would get 

 fat, though owned by a poor man, and tethered in a public lane, 

 as well as with the result of that one cross with the short legged 

 Scotch cow, which a skilful breeder brought to a fixed type, by 

 judicious in breeding. 



The blood of Eclipse, himself closely inbred from Hautboy, 

 comes down to us through 120 years, almost as pure as it ran in 

 his own veins. 



Messenger's descendants, througli his own daughters, are 

 still the trotting horses of the world, and Justin Morgan's 

 descendant's, through the closest relations, are the strain that 

 have made that wonderful and ill-used piece of horseflesh so long- 

 useful to the Western Continent. 



650. — To get very fixed character, with undoubted power 

 to transmit its qualities, you must often keep working on the 

 same strain of blood, but under general circumstances you need 

 not keep to what are called very close relations. The more 

 closely you keep to one blood, the more vigilant you must be to 

 avoid the defects to which that strain has the strongest tendency, 

 and to shun the slightest symptom of disease. 



651. — The English Thoroughbred is a good specimen of the 

 best kind of inbreeding. Close relations are generally avoided, 

 but the breeder never ooes outside of the blood that has Ions- 

 proved the best, or beyond the few families that have bred 

 together for nearly two centuries. The race being constantly 



