ting,
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 permanent, so that it is handed
down unimpaired and even strengthened in the hands of the judicious
breeder. What an extraordinary influence has thus been exerted by a
single bull on the fortunes of the Short-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 'Foljambe.' 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
generation, 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
'Favorite.' She is one-sixteenth 'Favorite' on that account, but the
cow to which he was then put was also descended from 'Favorite,' and so
are each of the other seven bulls and seven cows which stand on the
same level of descent with the gr. gr. g. dam of 'Charmer.' And in fact
it will be found on examination that in so far as 'Charmer's' pedigree
is known, which it is in some instances to the sixteenth generation,
she is not one-sixteenth only but nearly nine-sixteenths of pure
Favorite blood. This arises from 'Favorite' hav