36 CATTLE-BREEDING. 



ment to show how little we can tell of the 

 result by even a full knowledge of sire and 

 dam. It is as if two chemical substances hith- 

 erto never united were in our hands about to 

 be combined. Who could prophesy that two 

 parts of hydrogen gas and one of oxygen would 

 form a drop of water? Let the bull stand for 

 the two parts of hydrogen (H 2 ) and the cow be 

 denoted by one part of oxygen (0), and inter- 

 bred we would have a product (H 2 0) composed 

 of nothing but the two entities we once had 

 whose character and nature we understood, and 

 yet utterly inexplicable by anything known of 

 the component parts. The skillful analyst can 

 again resolve one drop of water into its origi- 

 nal elements. A careful observer may in one 

 case and another trace the lines where the two 

 animals unite in their offspring, but not very 

 often. The union of one animal nature with 

 another is too intimate and too subtle to ever 

 be clearly understood or sundered. 



But in breeding cattle this much is certain: 

 that each breeding animal must be weighed in 

 the scale as one-half of every desired resultant. 

 This is the basis of all our calculations. We 

 shall see hereafter the special influences, such 

 as animal prepotency, which often affect this 

 calculation, and when once observed in any 

 given animal, whether existing as a positive or 

 negative quantity in the particular case in 

 hand, it must be taken into account. 



