PEDIGREE. 221 



the sake of fancy and high prices. Once started 

 the canker eats deeper and deeper. Since de- 

 fects and diseases are prepotent, as we have 

 seen that they are, a defective bull will some- 

 times taint a whole herd, and through his get 

 many herds. And so the work goes on till the 

 record contained in the pedigree is a long, sad 

 tale of loss, decline, and decay. This is only 

 too common an occurrence, and few breeders 

 of experience are unfamiliar with the course of 

 decadence under such circumstances. 



A pedigree is the simple record of a family's 

 life. The only thing which makes pedigrees 

 difficult to understand by those who have given 

 them little or no study is, first, the abbreviated 

 form in which they are commonly written; and 

 second, the rapid widening out as we ascend to 

 remote ancestors, and the consequent com- 

 plexity and multiplicity of detail. It is com- 

 paratively easy, think most men, to trace a 

 man's genealogy. It comes down the male line 

 and the family name forms an easily-followed 

 clue. The long generations, too, take us back 

 so fast that we can go as far as most men care 

 to go before there is much variety. I say, most 

 men think it is easy so to trace a man's pedi- 

 gree ; but as a matter of fact men do with human 

 pedigrees just as they are apt to do with those 

 of animals attend to one line to the exclusion 

 of every other only here it is the male, while 



