THE AMERICAN HERD BOOK. 239 



the natural law of descent may, by an extreme chance, either beget or 

 produce an offspring which may show in some one feature, or even 

 more, a cropping out of its impurity a remote chance, indeed. Still, 

 an animal without the least taint of impure blood in its veins is better ; 

 but to ascertain that fact, to a certainty, may be pronounced a sheer 

 impossibility when we consider the various authorities on which the 

 English pedigrees have from time to time been founded. 



We do not give the above scale, or analysis of approach to pure 

 blood, as an encouragement to grade or impure breeding, but to 

 demonstrate the almost impossibility of tracing pure breeding back 

 to a period in which a remote taint of outside blood may not have 

 crept into the veins of an animal, or a tribe of animals, which have 

 always passed for thorough-bred, both before and since the year 1822, 

 when the first Herd Book was established. We have made the anal- 

 ysis also to demonstrate the injustice of condemning an animal 

 having a remote taint of impure blood far away back in its English 

 lineage where its pedigree has been admitted into the Herd Books of 

 that country, even when such- remote taint can be traced ; and we 

 may assert the injustice also of denying purity of blood to animals 

 imported into America without pedigrees at all, both before and 

 since the English Herd Book was established, such animals being 

 certified by creditable breeders' evidence that they were good Short- 

 horns. The names of such originally non-pedigreed animals and 

 their produce have been sent back to England for record in the Herd 

 Books there, and they have been accepted and recorded as Short- 

 horns ; whether right or wrong, in all individual instances, we do not 

 decide but there we find them. A short pedigree of but four or five 

 crosses, even at the present day,' appears to have no terror to Eng- 

 lish breeders, as we find bulls recorded, by name only, as late as the 

 year 1843, in Vol. 4, by Coates, and in Vols. 6 and 7, in 1846 and 

 1847, by Mr. Strafford. We also find many bulls in the continuous 

 volumes down to the ipth, published in 1871, which have only two, 

 three, or four known crosses in their pedigrees, and no one, either 

 in England or America, appears to question the integrity of their 

 blood as legitimately belonging to the Short-horn race. 



