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
fort