Animal Husbandry Investigations in 1917. 217 



The complete list of the calves which have been born into 

 the cross-bred herd from February 7. 1917 to October 15, 1918 

 is shown in Table 5. page 216. This list together with those of 

 previous reports will give the cross-bred animals thus far ob- 

 tained. 



The herd has already furnished the data for a bulletin 4 

 which is now in press. The results with which the bulletin dealt 

 are, of course, largely those of color inheritance. The impor- 

 tance of such results is evident as it is already well known that 

 the inter-relationship between inheritable characters is such that 

 a knowledge of the inheritance of the colors of the cattle coat 

 mav lead to a knowledge of the inheritance of the factors for 

 milk production. It is necessary, of course, to know the heredi- 

 tary behavior of the coat colors, etc., before advantage can be 

 taken of this knowledge. This first bulletin was planned to deal 

 only with this color inheritance. In later studies the associa- 

 tion of these characters with milk and butter-fat production 

 will be considered. 



The essential results may be quoted from the summary as 

 follows : 



"No influence on the vigor of the offspring would be ex- 

 pected from the width of the out-crosses as inbreeding studies 

 showed the inbreeding low in amount. 



"Black body color is dominant to the other colors in the 

 first generation. In the second generation there occurred an 

 orange coated bull and a dark Jersey heifer. This is to be ex- 

 pected on the grounds of a recessive dilution factor in the 

 Guernsey breed. This factor is not normally present in the 

 Jersey breed. 



To clearly show the inheritance of Black and Fawn, Plate I 

 has been drawn up to illustrate how the actual crosses were 

 made and the coat colors of the resulting offspring. 



"It has been shown that white marking of the body taken 

 as a whole appears as a dominant. Study of the individual 

 white areas, however, indicate that this is due to white in the 



4 Gowen, John W. Inheritance Studies of Certain Color and Horn 

 Characters in First Generation Crosses of Dairy and Beef Breeds. Bul- 

 letin 272, Maine Agricultural Experiment Station. 



