CHAPTER II. 

 IN-BKEEDING— OUT-CROSSING. 



I HAVE promised elsewliere to explain my views on the ad- 

 vantages or disadvantages of in-breeding with regard to the 

 breed of racehorses, and will now proceed to do so. It is much 

 to be regretted that our writers on zoology have not, iustead of 

 sheep, pigs, cattle, or cart horses, chosen the thoroughbred horse 

 as the basis of their investigations in that direction. 



According to my idea, no species of animal creation is so 

 specially adapted for that purpose, for here incontestable facts 

 and the accumulated statistics of the racing calendar collected 

 during a space of more than one hundred and seventy years, 

 are available as incontrovertible evidence, whereas in the 

 breeding spheres selected and treated on by the zoologists, 

 much must naturally depend on personal opinion, unreliable 

 information, statements copied from other authors, or similar 

 unsupported assertions. 



The origin of the English thoroughbred is carried back to 

 three Oriental ancestors, viz., the Byerly Turk, the Darley 

 Arabian, and the Godolphin Arabian. It is a universally 

 recognized maxim to count all living stud horses as belong- 

 ing to those families from which they descend in a direct male 

 line, the maternal descent being a matter of secondary consid- 

 eration. It is manifest that this classification should not in all 

 cases be a criterion, for a horse may have in its veins, tlirough 

 the dams, double the quantity of blood from their families to 

 that which is derived from the male descent of its sire, and yet 

 is considered to belong to the family of the latter. 



If, however, the object is to gain a general view of the whole 

 breed, and especially of those families which in course of time 

 have proved most successful, and to follow up their origin to 



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