VARIATION. 73 



mal. In the cases resulting from the effort of 

 Nature to adapt the beast to its surroundings 

 the prepotency is more marked, so much so 

 that it is one of the accepted principles that 

 u a variation is prepotent over a normal char- 

 acteristic." The variations being here the 

 result of an accumulated tendency of a long 

 period, often of many generations, not unnat- 

 urally show great strength and persistency. 



As we have seen, there is no rule by which we 

 can measure the amount of prepotency in any 

 given animal or of any given tendency. Some 

 variations occurring singly are naturally diffi- 

 cult to fix. Others occur contemporaneously 

 in more than one animal, and these interbred 

 give a starting point. In the breeding of pig- 

 eons the great field outside of the vegetable 

 kingdom for the study of variation, selection 

 and other natural laws, many new and peculiar 

 varieties have been obtained by somewhat ran- 

 dom crosses from which variations of many 

 kinds have been secured and great numbers of 

 extraordinary varieties obtained, all of which 

 breed perfectly true. 



The frequent boast of the breeders of polled 

 breeds of cattle that when crossed with the 

 horned breeds & great majority of the young 

 cattle are hornless is a good illustration of this 

 prepotency of the variation over the normal 

 type, which is the more notable when taken in 



