98 PRINCIPLES OF BREEDING. 



and the practice has been carried so far, the selections 

 not always being the most judicious possible, as to re- 



the merit either may possess does in a great degree depend upon its 

 having been inherited by them through a long line of ancestry. 

 Nothing is more remarkable than the way in which the earlier im- 

 provers of the Short-horn breed carried out their belief in this. They 

 were indeed driven by the comparative fewness of well bred animals 

 to a repeated use of the same sire on successive generations of his 

 own begetting, while breeders now-a^days have the advantage of fifty 

 different strains and families from which to choose the materials of 

 their herd, but whether it were necessity or choice it is certain that 

 the pedigree of no pure bred Short-horn can be traced without very 

 soon reaching many an illustration of the way in which ' breeding 

 in-and-in' has influenced its character, deepened it, made it perma- 

 nent, so that it is handed down unimpaired and even strengthened 

 in the hands of the judicious breeder. What an extraordinary influ- 

 ence has thus been exerted by a single bull on the fortunes of the 

 Shoi-t-horn breed ! There is hardly a single choice pure-bred Short- 

 horn that is not descended from ' Favorite' (252) and not only 

 descended in a single line — ^but descended in fifty different lines. 

 Take any single animal, and this bull shall occur in a dozen of its 

 preceding generations and repeatedly up to a hundred times ! in the 

 animals of some of the more distant generations. His influence is 

 thus so paramount in the breed that one fancies he has created it and 

 that the present character of the whole breed is due the ' accidental' 

 appearance of an animal of extraordinary endowments on the stage 

 in the beginning of the present century. And yet this is not so ; — he 

 is himself an illustration of the breeding in-and-in system — his sire 

 and dam having been half brother and sister, both got by ' Fojjambe.' 

 And this breeding in-and-in has handed down his influence to the 

 present time in an extraordinary degree. Take for instance, the cow 

 ' Charmer,' from which as will be seen elsewhere, no fewer than 

 thirty-one descendants are to be sold next Wednesday. She had of 

 course two immediate parents, four progenitors in the second gener- 

 ation, eight in the third, sixteen in the fourth, the number necessarily 

 doubling each step farther back. Of the eight bulls named in the 

 fourth generation from which she was descended, one was by ' Favor- 



