THE CORRECT PRINCIPLES OF BREEDING ANIMALS. 521 
But there are man} r problems in breeding still unsolved. It 
is well understood that if we persevere year after year in select- 
ing those animals to breed from which have certain peculiarities, 
we shall in time obtain a breed with these peculiarities stamped 
upon it as constitutional. It may also be known, that if we are 
to cross, we must not breed from crossed animals, but carry back 
the crossed blood to breed from its own original stock of the 
one kind or the other, or we shall have a race of the most unlike 
mongrels. Why this is, we know not. We may attempt to 
cross a small-breed pig with a large breed, in order to improve 
the size of the one, and the fattening qualities of the other; but 
we shall get a divided litter : half will be large coarse-haired 
animals, the other small fine-haired ; the one resembling one 
parent, and the other the other. We cannot, by crossing these, 
obtain a middle breed. And yet the middle breed is forming : 
the large breed is disappearing as much ; and is being replaced 
by one of finer hair and smaller bone, more resembling the small 
breed in quality, and the large breed in size. 
How is thisl Crossing is not the way to accomplish it. It 
must be done by selection and careful weeding of breeds. A 
breeder begins to select ; he takes his best grazing and finest- 
quality sow; he seeks a boar where quality rather than size is 
the object ; the most promising of their produce is chosen, and 
this again carried to the finest animal of its kind ; and thus a 
fine breed is obtained from the original stock, without one viola- 
tion of the course of nature. 
Again, the Alderney cow is about — or was about, we ought 
rather to say — as great a violation of the symmetrical points of 
a well-formed animal as it is well possible to imagine. Now 
attempts have been made to cross this with the short-horn, in 
the hopes that the most symmetrical would surely correct the 
great failings of the least, and so produce at least a moderately- 
formed animal — but no such thing. The produce was an ugly 
useless nondescript. It had lost the beauty of the short-horn, 
and the milking propensities of the Alderney. If breeds are to 
be crossed, they must be crossed evidently by a breed within a 
certain range of similitude, or they will violate the principles of 
nature, and end in a creation of monstrosities. 
It is a curious subject of investigation, whether all breeds of 
animals of a certain class — say cattle — were originally one. 
Can the long-horned Craven, and the hornless Galloway — the 
diminutive Kyloe and the stately Devon — the quaint and flat- 
shaped Alderney and the portly short-horned Durham, all have 
been, one day, of one common stock ? The investigation is 
curious and attractive. It has baffled naturalists and philo- 
sophers, and is not uninterwoven with the controversies ol theo- 
VOL. XXIV. 4 B 
