Pedigree is valuable in proportion as it shows an animal to be descended, not only from such as are purely of its own race or breed, but also from such individuals in that breed as were specially noted for the excellencies for which that particular breed is esteemed. Weeds are none the less worthless because they appear among a crop consisting chiefly of valuable plants, nor should deformed or degenerate plants, although they be true to their kind, ever be employed to produce seed. If we would have good cabbages or turnips, it is needful to select the most perfect and the soundest to grow seed from, and to continue such selection year after year. Precisely the same rule holds with regard to animals.
The pertinacity with which hereditary traits cling to the organization in a latent, masked or undeveloped condition for long after they might be supposed to be wholly "bred out" is sometimes very remarkable. What is known among breeders of Short-horns as the "Galloway alloy," although originating by the employment for only once of a single animal of a different breed, is said to be traceable even now, after many years, in the occasional development of a "smutty nose" in descendants of that family.
Many years ago there were in the Kennebec valley a few polled or hornless cattle. They were not particularly cherished, and gradually diminished in numbers. Mr. Payne Wingate shot the last animal of this breed, (a bull calf or a yearling,) mistaking it in the dark for a bear. During thirty-five years subsequently all the cattle upon his farm had horns, but at the end of that time one of his cows produced a calf which grew up without horns, and Mr. Wingate said it was, in all respects, the exact image of the first bull of the breed brought there.
Probably the most familiar exemplification of clearly marked ancestral influence among us, is to be found in the ill-begotten, round-breeched calves occasionally, and not very unfrequently, dropped by cows of the common mixed kind, and which, if killed early, make very blue veal, and if allowed to grow up, become exceedingly profitless and unsatisfactory beasts; the heifers being often sterile, the cows poor milkers, the oxen dull, mulish beasts, yielding flesh of very dark color, ill flavor and destitute of fat. They are known by various names in different localities, in Maine as the "Whitten" and "Peter Waldo" breed, in Massachusetts as "Yorkshire" and "Westminster," in New York as the "Pumpkin buttocks," in England as "Lyery" or "Lyery Dutch," &c., &c.
Those in northern New England are believed to be descended chiefly from a bull brought from Watervliet, near Albany, New York, more than forty years ago, (in 1818,) by the Shakers at Alfred, in York county, Maine, and afterwards transferred to their brethren in Cumberland county. No one who has proved the worthlessness of these cattle can readily believe that any bull of this sort would have been knowingly kept for service since the first one brought into the State, and yet it is by no means a rare occurrence to find calves dropped at the present time bearing unmistakable evidence of that origin.
It seems likely that this disagreeable peculiarity was first brought into the country by means of some of the early importations of Dutch or of the old Durham breed.
Culley, in speaking of the Short-horns, inclines to the opinion that they were originally from Holland, and himself recollected men who in the early part of their lives imported Dutch cattle into the county of Durham, and of one Mr. Dobinson he says, he was noted for having the best breed of Short-horns of any and sold at high prices. "But afterwards some other persons of less knowledge, going over, brought home some bulls that introduced the disagreeable kind of cattle called lyery or double lyered, that is, black-fleshed. These will feed to great weight, but though fed ever so long will not have a pound of fat about them, neither within or without, and the flesh (for it does not deserve to be called beef) is as black and coarse grained as horse flesh. No man will buy one of this kind if he knows any thing of the matter, and if he should be once taken in he will remember it well for the future; people conversant with cattle very readily find them out by their round form, particularly their buttocks, which are turned like a black coach horse, and the smallness of the tail; but they are best known to the graziers and dealers in cattle by the feel or touch of the fingers; indeed it is this nice touch or feel of the hand that in a great measure constitutes the judge of cattle."
FOOTNOTES:
[15] From the Latin Atavus—meaning any ancestor indefinitely, as a grandmother's great grandfather.