THE BREEDING OF ANIMALS, IN GENERAL 71 



them to special conditions and purposes. Thus we have a strain 

 of cattle that, having been selected from generation to generation 

 for their milk yield, have become so profuse in the secreting of 

 milk that we call them by a certain breed name. The object 

 sought being milk yield and through several generations se- 

 lected for this one purpose, the ability to secrete a large flow 

 became fixed and capable of transmission to the offspring. 

 This increased milk flow is not to be understood as a new 

 character, as all cows give some milk,, but merely an increase in 

 the ability to secrete milk in large quantities. 



Like produces like. — Everything brings forth after its kind. 

 In order that the offspring be a high-producing heifer, it is neces- 

 sary that the dam and sire before her be of a high-producing 

 strain of cattle. In other words, the offspring will bear a close 

 resemblance to the parents in all important essentials. This 

 Bakewell recognized, and he shocked the modest people of his 

 time by uniting animals that possessed the characters he wished 

 to propagate without regard to the relationship of the animals. 

 If a cow and her son possessed the characters he wished to retain, 

 he united them, and in this way secured an offspring possessing 

 the desirable characters to a greater degree than either parent. 

 It has been said of Bakewell that he regarded his animals as 

 wax out of which in time he could mold any form that he desired 

 to create. All farm animals have been molded to a great degree 

 by man. It is now thought that the Percheron draft horse and 

 the Shetland pony have descended from the same original type 

 of horse, and that the Shorthorn and the Jersey descended from 

 the same type of cow. In one case there was a continuous selec- 

 tion, whether natural or artificial, for a large animal with the re- 

 sult that to-day we have the ponderous draft horse; in the case of 

 the pony the selection was for the smaller animal with the result 

 that we have a diminutive horse. This selection has been going 

 on for ages, and now the two types are fixed under their present 

 conditions. Bear in mind, however, that a reversal of the con- 



