138 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



but the breed will be spoiled if you breed in-and-in Anglo- 

 Saxons, brother and sister, or mother and father. One is a 

 moral crime ; the other is the foundation of national superi- 

 ority. You see at once the difference. Now do the same thing 

 on your farm. Breed in-and-in, but do not permit incest among 

 your animals. Breed in-and-in those who are of the same kind, 

 but do not breed in-and-in those which have such close family 

 ties that you would breed disease in them by the closeness of 

 the blood. That distinction is the first fundamental distinction 

 of all good breeding. You must breed in-and-in, to have the 

 proper stock to experiment upon, for several generations, so 

 that you shall have animals that will hold the same ancestral 

 relation to one another. You see, therefore, that to procure a 

 proper animal for experiment will take you several generations. 

 You cannot get that easily with cows ; you may get it more 

 easily with sheep ; and in a series of experiments which I have 

 proposed to some of my friends, I have advised them to take 

 sheep, in order sooner to have the elements upon which to make 

 sound and valuable experiments. 



Now, when you have the third and fourth generation obtained 

 in that way, by the connection of individuals closely allied to 

 one another, but which have no blood relation to each other, 

 tlien you have individuals from which you have eliminated 

 the ancestral element that might re-appear in the next gener- 

 ation. Suppose you prepare in this way a number of coarse- 

 wool sheep, so that you have male and female individuals which 

 have no blood left except that of their own, and you prepare 

 in the same way another number of merino individuals. Now, 

 you cross them both ways — merino ram with coarse-wool ewe, 

 and, vice versa, coarse-wool ram with merino ewe, and you will 

 very soon ascertain what is the transmission of one male with 

 one kind of female, and of another male with another kind of 

 female. You will then have experiments which will begin to 

 be valuable with reference to the law of transmission of the 

 peculiarities of breed through breed ; of that crossing between 

 breed and breed which is so different from the intercrossing of 

 individuals of two different species. The law of the transmis- 

 sion of qualities from breed to breed, in crossings of breeds, is 

 yet to be ascertained. We have nothing but guess-work about 

 it so far. 



