POINTS FROM WHICH THE PROPORTIONS ARE STUDIED. 399 



quintessence of the faculties and aptitudes of the procreators, the laity 

 were easily led to the firm belief that children were really the very 

 blood of their parents. 



At the beginning, the word blood could then be considered as almost 

 synonymous with the word heredity. At the present time it is nothing 

 more than a corruption of it, in this sense, that it is not applied indis- 

 criminately to all hereditary characters, but only to a few of them, to 

 those which refer especially to the moral qualities of the parents. 



We understand, then, what is meant when a horse is said to have 

 blood y to be well bred. The idea intended to be conveyed is that the 

 horse has been more or less subjected to metissage, breeding animals of 

 different races in earlier times. The animal of a high lineage, de- 

 scended from a noble race, and whose ancestors were entirely free from 

 all contamination, is qualified as being of pure blood. Lastly, the 

 horse deprived of all the qualities inherent to blood is styled a common 

 horse, while, a fortiori, one descended from parents that have never 

 been mixed with pure-blooded animals is the low plebeian of the 

 species. 



But the aptitudes of the better races of the horse are not always a 

 constant result of direct heredity, that is to say, the immediate result 

 of the sire's or dam's influence ; sometimes they pass over one or more 

 generations to reappear in the succeeding ones. Indeed, these aptitudes 

 before being definitely established in the better races must have been 

 developed slowly under the combined and incessant action of a thou- 

 sand different causes ; they must, therefore, have shown themselves 

 at a given time in the individual before being transmissible to the 

 descendants, and then constituting the appanage of a determined type. 



On the other hand, subjects of the same family, whatever may 

 be their resemblance, do not always possess identical qualities ; the 

 numerous and different attributes of the species are not uniformly 

 inherited by them ; the qualities which each one possesses at birth are 

 neither the same in nature, nor equal in intensity, nor similar in value. 

 In any case, it is, first of all, an ancestral inheritance, the special, un- 

 conscious accumulation of qualities resulting from the choice of the 

 male and female for centuries. It may proceed, besides, from a more 

 or less intelligent selection on the part of the breeder, who endeavors 

 to work in the same manner as Nature, and in concert with her aids 

 her by his practical knowledge. That is what constitutes inbornness, 

 which is nothing else, as may be seen, than a kind of indirect heredity. 



The organism, therefore, inherits from selective accumulation and 

 the application of zootechnic methods by man, certain qualities which, 



