102 PEINCIPLES AND PEACTICB OP BREEDING. 



absolute certainty. Yet, by a proper course of breeding, 

 we can control that action to a considerable degree ; we 

 can generally keep it in channels which are favorable to our 

 wishes ; we can avoid manifold evils which arise from 

 promiscuous procreation ; and a few, more gifted or more 

 zealous in the attainment of their objects than the rest of us, 

 can make permanent improvements in the forms and properties 

 of our domestic animals, and thus confer important benefits 

 on society. 



If the male and female parent possess the same given 

 peculiarity of structure, or in breeders' phrase, the same good 

 or bad "point," the chances are very strong that the progeny 

 will also possess it, because the progeny is most likely to 

 inherit the structure of its immediate progenitors ; and 

 whether it receives that portion of the structure from one or 

 the other of them, or partly from both, it stiU receives the 

 same peculiar form. If all the remoter ancestors also 

 possessed the same point, then the progeny must, in the 

 ordinary course of nature, be sure to inherit it, for let it 

 breed back to whatever ancestor it may, it must inherit the 

 same conformation. This law applies to properties as well 

 as forms. Hence it is that in breeding between pure blood 

 animals of the same breed and family, we find like producing 

 like, so far as the family likeness is concerned, in steady and 

 endless order, and this necessarily includes a good deal of 

 individual likeness. Indeed, it is this long continued 

 preservation and transmission to descendants of the same 

 properties by one family that constitutes "blood," in its 

 technical sense — and its " purity " is its utter isolation from 

 the blood of all other families. The full blood, or pure 

 blood, or thorough-bred animal — for all these terms imply 

 the same thing* — can inherit from its parents, or take 

 from its remoter ancestors by breeding back, only the same 

 family characteristics. 



But in breeding between mongrels — animals produced 

 by the crossing of difierent breeds — the closest resemblance 

 of the parents in any point not common to both breeds, does 

 not insure the transmission of their characteristics in that 

 point to their offspring ; for the offspring may obtain different 

 ones by breeding back to either of the ancestors with which 

 the cross commenced, or to some intermediate and partially 



* At least, as they are used in this Tolnme. An effort has been made in some 

 quarters to introdnce a distinction between these significations, bat, in my Judgment, 

 without any authority. 



