14 THE HORSE BOOK. 



horses the less weight do I grant to heredity 

 and the more to environment and the personal 

 equation. 



Heredity has been supposed to fix type. It 

 does with certain conditions and it does not 

 without. Wild animals are of truly fixed type ; 

 improved domestic animals are not. The Nu- 

 bian lion is the same today as he was 1,000 

 years ago; he will be the same tomorrow and 

 1,000. years hence, if the conditions under which 

 he lives remain the same. There has been no 

 admixture of alien strain in his blood. He is 

 not a composite and therefore he is immune 

 from variation, the law of which no one under- 

 stands, the operation of which no one can fore- 

 see, which is sometimes in advance, generally 

 in retrogression. 



All improved breeds are of recent origin and 

 all are composites. The good, the bad and the 

 indifferent are to be seen in them all. If we 

 accept the types of the wild animals as fixed, 

 then we must admit that the types of improved 

 animals are not fixed. Compare any of our im- 

 proved breeds with the wild goose or the buffalo 

 for an illustration. Admitting that heredity is 

 one of the fundamental principles with which 

 the breeder has to deal, we must grant that any 

 animal is an aggregation of the essential ele- 

 ments of all his ancestors, the influence of the^se 

 ancestors decreasing as they become more re- 

 mote. Nevertheless the tendency to revert to 



