PEDIGREE. 



THE instant that an animal distinguishes 

 itself for peculiar excellence of any kind its 

 offspring are regarded as of a specially desirable 

 character. This is simply a recognition of the 

 law that like produces like. The fixedness of 

 this law in the mind of men is always being 

 thus illustrated. This is the basis of pedigree. 

 Because men know that like produces like they 

 expect good produce from good animals, and, 

 in view of this, note the ancestry of every ani- 

 mal sprung of valuable parents. The next step 

 is to carry this on to the third generation 

 where a worthy son has succeeded a noble sire, 

 and so on generation after generation. Pedi- 

 gree is therefore a record of the ancestry of an 

 animal ; a table of descent. Simply this. There 

 is no magic spell in a pedigree, no mysterious 

 influence passing out of it and influencing the 

 animal whose genealogy it contains. It may 

 be a record of good ancestry, it may be un- 

 happily too often is a list of bad progenitors. 



Naturally in an early day it was not cus- 

 tomary to preserve any account of the ancestry 

 of an animal unless it was very distinguished. 



(215) 



