32 Breeding Plants and Animals. 



methods of securing such germs and of bringing their 

 progeny into general use are of vast importance. We 

 need to breed for intrinsic qualities ; to record the large 

 values of authentic pedigrees, and so to exploit the 

 values of the best breeding stocks that the people will 

 use them. 



Francis Galton says statistics show that only one 

 man in about 5,000 rises to marked prominence. Man 

 is a very complicated individual and the successful 

 man must have correlated to this nature very many 

 qualities so combined as to give him pronounced abil- 

 ities. Galton also emphasized the fact brought out by 

 Wallace that Messenger became the father of the 

 American trotter, though many other Thoroughbred 

 horses were in competition with him in the early efforts 

 of the breeders to produce trotters by using running 

 stallions on American common and grade mares. 

 Messenger evidently had that strange power of pre- 

 potency which resulted in his blood giving the form, the 

 fiber, the wind, the docility under training and the 

 instincts to contest and win the trotting race. He was 

 one sire in thousands whose blood flowed powerfully 

 toward the trotting gait through generations of his pro- 

 geny. To analyze his power to transmit against the 

 blood of dams or to "nick" with their blood is a pro- 

 cess as yet not fully worked out. We must accept the 

 wonderful fact, hoping that it may some day be better 

 understood. But we can use many important facts 

 which we cannot understand. Seeds germinate and why 

 should not new breeds germinate? Messenger was the 

 first seed of the breed known as the American trotter. 

 I understand that Prof, de Vries has deduced evi- 

 dence that in nature species are not always developed 

 by gradual evolution, but that there is a strong element 

 of revolution, an occasional marked mutation from the 

 species, variety or breed. No one familiar with the 

 work of Darwin, Mendel, de Vries and their fellow 

 workers on the theory of heredity can believe in the 

 old theory of the immutability of species. Occasionally, 



