Page:The Evolution of British Cattle.djvu/101

 Countries were larger and, in the opinion of eighteenth-century stock-breeders, better than those that were in Britain before them, it was to their descendants that men turned for stock with which to improve their own. The Longhorns, which were a combination of the Dutch and several of the races in Britain before them, were the great "improvers" till the end of the eighteenth century, when they were ousted from that position by the Shorthorns, and to some extent, the Herefords, two breeds also of composite character. But we shall better understand the process by which some of our modern breeds have been produced—the jumbling together, as it were, of different races and the emergence of new types of stock—after a short consideration of Mendel's theories, just as we should better understand how certain salts may be mixed together and new ones produced, by some knowledge of chemistry.

It is one of the greatest tragedies in science that Mendel's "Experiments with Plant Hybrids" ("Versuche über Pflanzen Hybriden"), which was published by the Natural History Society of Brünn in 1865, remained unknown till the present century. It is impossible to imagine where we should have been to-day in our knowledge of heredity had Darwin only known of Mendel's work. But Darwin's own discovery so entranced the world that Mendel's was condemned to