Consanguinity

The Percheron Horse by Charles Duhays.

Consanguinity.

Conjugal consanguinity has neither partisans nor friends.

The physiologist, physician, priest, and legislator have always launched against it the same anathema.

The discovery of the value of the bull Hubback would have been to no purpose had his descendants not been classified by themselves in an authentic manner.

For it is especially and only in the reproduction by family that a breed is formed.

Consanguinity alone can form, in the beginning, a bond of cohesion and connection among the descendants of the primitive families.

By it alone they acquire that great similarity of shape and adaptation to particular ends, that great ancestral power which they transmit to their posterity, and which, even in a commercial point of view, gives them a superior value.