EDITORIAL OBSERVATIONS. 
653 
2. — The hereditary diseases of Horses. 
3. — The hereditary diseases of Cattle. 
That properties, characters, and qualities, physical, mental 
and moral, are transmitted from parent to progeny, the society 
of every-day life furnishes us with the most familiar and 
striking examples of: the offspring furnishing un autre soi-meme 
of the parent, not in size and form and feature alone, but 
in disposition and temperament, and capabilities of mind, as 
well ; though all these inherent or inherited qualifications are 
apt to evince more or less modification, or even deviation or 
alteration, in the issue from the parent stock ; while all admit of 
development arid amelioration by training and education ; and 
none, in this respect, are apt to evince their improvement 
more conspicuously than those of the mind. The culture of 
the mind, however, blazes out most markedly in the differ- 
ence between civilised and savage life ; the latter being, in the 
lowest condition of it, little raised above brute nature itself, 
save that it has moulded up in its nature properties which, 
by cultivation, are capable of high polish, of an eminence 
of progression to which brute kind is by no sort of culture 
capable of reaching. Why should not diseases, the same 
as physical structure and mental functions, be alike suscep- 
tible of transmission down from parent to offspring? 
Do we not see in animals, as in men, size, form, temper, 
and habit inherited ? Are not particular breeds of particular 
colour ? — to wit, the Lincolnshire Cart-horse, which is black ; 
the Cleveland bay ; the Arabian, or thorough-bred, bay or 
chesnut, seldom grey, and still more rarely black ? In animals, 
as in men, the breed will undergo modification and improve- 
ment, or deterioration, according to keep and rearing, &c. ; 
but in any alteration it may sustain, the inbred qualities of 
inheritance will still, more or less, peep out in some special 
shape or other. In cattle, too, how apparent and remarkable 
inheritance is ? It is that which maintains the distinctness of 
the breeds ; though manifold crosses and re-crosses are such 
as to operate more or less in subduing or destroying certain 
family resemblances, as well as in substituting alterations or 
modifications for them, and to such an extent as to require, 
