ANCESTRAL INFLUENCE. 35 



If we would have good cabbages or turnips, it is need- 

 ful to select the most i^erfect and the soundest to grow 

 seed from, and to continue such selection year after 

 year. Precisely the same rule holds with regard to 

 animals. 



The pertinacity with which hereditary traits cling to 

 the organization in a latent, masked or undeveloj^ed 

 condition for long after they might be supposed to be 

 wholly "bred out'' is sometimes very remarkable. 

 What is known among breeders of Short-horns as the 

 ''Galloway alloy," although originating by the employ- 

 ment for only once of a single animal of a different 

 breed, is said to be traceable even now, after many 

 years, in the occasional development of a "smutty 

 nose" in descendants of that family. 



Many years ago there were in the Kennebec valley 

 a few polled or hornless cattle. They were not partic- 

 ularly cherished, and gradually diminished in numbers. 

 Mr. Payne Wingate shot the last animal of this breed, 

 (a bull calf or a yearling,) mistaking it in the dark for 

 a bear. During thirty-five years subsequently all the 

 cattle upon his farm had horns, but at the end of that 

 time one of his cows produced a calf which grew up 

 without horns, and Mr. Wingate said it was, in all re- 

 spects, the exact image of the first bull of the breed 

 brought there. 



Probably the most familiar exemplification of clearly 



