64 Breeding of Plants and Animals. 



parent plant as well as of the parent animal was to be 

 found by measuring a large number of its progeny. 

 Formerly we had been content to breed from the best 

 individuals ; now we have learned to use the blood of 

 the best breeders and to devise methods all along the 

 line to measure breeding powers in the terms of aver- 

 ages of large fraternity groups of progeny. 



Since there is only one very strong breeder in 

 thousands of a given race of plants, and Francis Gal- 

 ton showed that there is only one really brainy man in 

 5,000, it was necessary to devise experimental and sta- 

 tistical methods of measuring and recording the breeding 

 values of wheat and other plants in the terms of the aver- 

 age of the progeny of the respective parents. We want 

 the blood of that one wheat plant in 10,000 whose blood 

 will add a bushel of wheat per acre to the wheat crop, 

 or, perchance, that one wheat plant in 100,000 whose 

 blood lines will add three dollars per acre to the value 

 of the wheat fields of the State. And we want a meth- 

 od of ferreting out those blood lines. We also want 

 the blood lines which will make a general-purpose 

 breed of cattle seemingly a simpler proposition with 

 a scientific, statistical method than it was for our fath- 

 ers to have made a trotting breed of horses from a 

 running breed by using a very crude statistical method 

 of breeding. Statistical methods of breeding will not 

 make mere name pedigrees and pedigrees based on 

 mere art go out of use, because we have use for all 

 these methods. But statistical pedigrees need incar- 

 nation. We have truly been playing at pedigree-making 

 in some lines where science and facts should have pre- 

 vailed more and mere artistic judging less, and far 

 greater progress should have been attained. Without 

 breeding, many of our best varieties of wheat, oats and 

 the like have gone backward and under breeding it 

 may be that some of the families of certain breeds of 

 hogs and cattle, if not of other species, have become of 

 less average value than formerly. 



