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As no one present dared to cope with the decline of so large a subject, the Colonel had the floor. He looked at each man in turn; then waved the hand that held his cigar airily towards the ceiling. "Just inbreeding, sir, inbreeding. That's what did it.
A standard which covers just the very rudiments of proportion and comeliness. People in small country towns, I admit, have little or no more beauty than people in large towns. This is curious, but may be due to too much inbreeding. The first counter to conclusions drawn from such figures is obviously: "The English are an ugly people."
There is no surer way of maintaining uniformity of type, and an examination of the extended pedigree of almost any famous dog will show how commonly inbreeding is practised.
A third cause may be suggested as having something to do with the matter, namely, that habits of close inbreeding, or intermarriage, might perhaps tend to overcome the natural repugnance to such a relation. Moreover, close inbreeding also, as the experiments of stock-breeders show, would tend to produce a surplus of male births, and so would act finally in the same way as the second cause.
The dependence of offspring upon parents is far longer in the human species than in any other species. Man has an antipathy to incest or close inbreeding which seems to be instinctive. This is not found clearly in any animal species below man.
Thus, all marriages between near relations being impossible, the chances to marry at all are considerably diminished, so that nowadays, with the decreased population, a man very often cannot find a wife, even though surrounded by any number of girls. I do not mean to imply by this that the whole clan-system was organized simply to prevent inbreeding.
The ground colour of this dog is white, with chestnut encircling the ears to the muzzle, the sides of the neck are chestnut, as are also the ears. There is a white blaze on the forehead, in the centre of which should be a clear lozenge-shaped chestnut spot, called the beauty spot, which by inbreeding with other varieties is fast being lost.
Uncles and aunts within the clan are called father and mother, and the cousins are called sister and brother. However, this exogamic system could not prevent inbreeding, as there was always the possibility that uncles and nieces might marry, so that a "horizontal" system was superimposed across this "vertical" one, forbidding all marriages between different generations.
Among these evils which are to be corrected we may also account that which arises from the unguided development of what are called fancy breeds. Thus among our horned cattle, the Jerseys have been brought to a point where, from the iniquitous inbreeding, which is against what may be called the morality of nature, they are fearfully subjected to tuberculosis.
When a son grew up, he followed his father's example, though his wife was old and with many children. The Tamils of southeast India, the Malaialais of the Kollimallais hills, have the same custom. Inbreeding maintains a fineness of breed, but at the cost of its vigor. That inbreeding is harmful is fairly certain. Examples to the contrary are numerous in human and animal life.
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