92 Breeding Plants and Animals. 



with the great markets for high-priced registered stock 

 and there has been no such general impulse to do high- 

 class breeding as in England or America. With seeds 

 the reverse has been true and continental Europe has 

 bred beets, wheats, oats, rye, vegetables and orna- 

 mentals much more extensively than has Britain. 



The Island of Jersey also has a lesson for us. Here 

 the stock has been kept pure by a law making it illegal 

 to import live animals. A thorough system of eye in- 

 spection, grading the cattle into registered, commended 

 and not commended classes, has long been maintained 

 and something has been done in basing the choice of 

 breeding stock on records of actual performance. Jer- 

 seymen would be better able to ask even larger prices 

 for their dairy blood if their records were based more 

 on statistical records of ability to produce annual net 

 profits. If one wished now to select the best possible 

 foundation animals for a herd of Jersey cattle he would 

 no doubt choose most of his stock from herds outside 

 the famous island. Our own American breeders have 

 more records of the average annual milk yield of entire 

 families of cows than have the island breeders, to serve 

 as a guide to purchasers. They also have more records 

 of the richness of the milk in fats. Some Americans 

 have still other facts more or less systematically kept, 

 as to the fecundity of certain families of cows, their 

 freedom from abortion and from failure to get in calf, 

 their resistance to tuberculosis, their kindness of dis- 

 position and the like. 



In starting a new herd, if a person were able to 

 secure facts along all these lines he would have a basis 

 for judging many of these cattle which he could not 

 afford to ignore and he would not choose cattle from 

 the Island of Jersey just because they were from that 

 island. Authentic figures would be more potent in pedi- 

 grees than the word "imported," so often used as the 

 chief point in the recommendation of animals. One or 

 two decades of breeding Jersey cattle following a good 

 statistical method bv an association in an American 



