1 Juve, 1899. | QUEENSLAND AGRICULTURAL JOURNAL. 439 
length and of medium fineness. He was taken to a station in the West of 
Queensland and put into a paddock, receiving very little artificial food, such as 
he had been accustomed to. The fleece grown during the first year, whilst he was 
in Queensland, showed all the characteristics of the Saxon sheep, his ancestors. 
The short grass and the dry climate had caused the reappearance of traces of 
the type of some of his ancestors, and it was considered advisable to select for him 
a class of ewes whose fleeces were calculated to counteract any shortness of staple 
which the animal might tend to transmit, descending as he originally did from a 
short-woolled flock, which had recently only been transformed into a longer 
stapled one, and now showing in his present home a tendency towards shortness 
of staple. 
I have mentioned these cases merely to show how important it is to dis- 
tinguish in a breed of animals between those qualities which are mainly the 
‘results of food and climate and those which are the genealogical property of 
the breed itself. Under ordinary circumstihces, however, we must consider the 
appearance of by far the greater number of qualities as due to the fact that they 
are, good or bad, the heirloom of the family as transmitted from ancestors. A 
careful consideration of these matters is the principal condition of any success 
in breeding. Darwin gives the following explanation :— No breeder doubts how 
strong is the tendency of inheritance. Like produces like, is his fundamental 
belief ; doubts have been thrown on this principle by theoretical writers alone. 
When any deviation of structure often appears, and we see it in the father and 
the child, we cannot tell whether it may not be due to the same cause having 
acted on both; but when amongst individuals apparently exposed to the same 
conditions, any very rare deviation, due to some extraordinary combinations of 
circumstances, appears in the parent, say, once amongst several million individuals, 
and it reappears in the child, the mere doctrine of chances almost compels us to 
attribute its reappearance to inheritance. Hyeryone must have heard of albinism, 
prickly skin, hairy bodies appearing in several members of the same family. If 
strange and rare deviations of structure are truly inherited, less strange and 
commoner deviations may be fairly admitted to be inheritable. 
Perhaps the correct way of viewing the whole subject would be to look at 
the inheritance of every character whatever as a rule, and non-inheritance as an 
anomaly. The laws of inheritance are quite unknown, and it is very much to be 
regretted that physiologists have not yet been able to enlighten us on that point. 
The same ideas which led to the employment of the term “ inheritance 
produced also the expression “blood.” It is as well to state here that the term 
“blood,” as used by the breeders of domestic animals, has, with them, an. entirely 
different meaning to what it has when used in the expression“ blue blood.” 
There are still people to be met with who firmly believe that the sublime 
members of our so-called aristocracy are in possession of a superior or blue 
blood. In what respect the aristocratic blood should differ from the democratic, 
no physiologist has been able to make out yet; and if a series of minute 
investigations should be instituted, the probabilities are thatthe blood of the 
good English yeoman will prove stronger and healthier than that of a son of the 
“ Lord No Zoo.” ree. 
The term “ blood,” as used in breeding, refers to a combination of several 
qualities which are valued either from a strictly practical pomt of view or as 
a iatter of fancy. 
A blood animal must first possess the desired qualities in ahighly developed 
form, so as to be strongly distinguished by them from the ordinary run of. 
animals; secondly, it must be descended from ancestors that have been bred. 
for a considerable time with the distinct aim of producing and developing the 
qualities in question ; thirdly, it must unfailingly transmit them under ordinary 
circumstances ; and, fourthly, blood animals must carry a certain family like- 
ness, as a proof of common descent from a constant race. 
Wherever these conditions are fulfilled, the animal’s body must possess a 
great similarity in the organisation of all its parts—in all the parts of the brain, 
the bone, the muscles, &¢. Also the fluids of the body with the cells, and other 
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