PREFACE 
Soon after the appearance of ‘Principles of Breeding” as 
a college textbook, numerous letters came to both the author 
and the publishers, suggesting a volume along similar lines, but 
less technical in treatment and better adapted to the needs of 
high and normal schools, and appealing more pera to the 
general student. 
These suggestions, together with the growing interest in agri- 
culture both as an occupation and as a subject for instruction 
in schools of various grades, encouraged the production of the 
_ present volume, which runs along the same general lines as 
“Principles of Breeding,” except that more information is 
afforded as to the origin of domesticated races and the source 
of the materials out of which they have been formed, and less 
space is devoted to function and to the more philosophic treat- 
ment of variation and heredity. 
More attention is given also to the general subjects of natural 
selection and the survival of the fittest as shown in the way of 
the wild, — subjects of importance to the high-school student 
as affording the foundation principles for improvement, and 
also as contributing to a more rational understanding of the 
general principles of evolution than commonly exists in the 
popular mind. 
An incidental purpose has been to insure the student of the 
secondary school an acquaintance with the essential facts of re- 
production as illustrated in plant life, and with the foundation 
principles in heredity, especially in degeneracy and crime, as 
illustrated in regression tables and the law of ancestral heredity. 
If the author has been at all successful at this point, the student 
will derive indirectly and by inference, through this study of 
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