BREEDING FARM STOCK. 
295 
It has now become more fashionable, since the Queen has 
her poultry yard and Cochin China breed at the royal farms 
of Windsor Park. 
I would show the melancholy effects of this in-breeding 
amongst the human species, and call to remembrance that, 
when a boy at school, I do remember the offspring of blood 
relations being so weak in nervous energy that two youths 
were sent from school some time before the other boys, 
because they should not be teased and made the butt of 
their more energetic schoolfellows. The blood connections 
are oftentimes promoted for the purpose of retaining pro- 
perty in families, which as often frustrates the object, by 
producing short-lived offsprings or deficient intellect for the 
enjoyment of the property, or the race not continued beyond 
one generation. I have known many such connexions that 
have not produced any progeny ; at other times some of the 
offspring have been complete idiots, (as with a family at 
Sydenham, twenty-five years ago, when I there saw three 
idiots kept in a cottage away from their more sane relations). 
Sometimes the offspring will be possessed of a precocity 
of talent in one direction, and be very short lived. On the 
occasion of my witnessing a marriage between two cousins 
at Bridgnorth, in Kent, about 25 years ago, and making 
some remarks thereon to a farmer’s wife in the village, she 
said I was perfectly correct, for she herself w as the offspring 
of first cousins, and had never been strong enough to bear a 
child ; and, as to her brother, he had never been able to do 
anything for himself all his life time. 
Mr. Lawrance, in one of his lectures, has said, the de- 
ficiency of nervous energy may not at first seem to show 
itself in a generation of offspring from blood relations ; the 
defect is not lost, but is shown in the second, third, or fourth 
generation, when the cause of the defect is lost and wrapped 
in mystery. 
It will be for farmers and the public to choose for them- 
selves, whether they will adopt the in-breeding practices 
of Mr. Barford, or bow to the reasonings, the experience of 
ages, and those physiologists who have made the animal 
diseases and defects, and economy of nature, their study 
throughout a life of close application to the subject. — E. J. 
Lance , Farmer’s Herald . 
