"JUST A MYTH"

Evening Post, Volume CXXVII, Issue 111, 13 May 1939, Page 22

"JUST A MYTH"

BRUCE LOWE SYSTEM

In America, comparatively few recognised authorities on breeding now treat Bruce Lowe's Figure System seriously, and, in a recent issue of the "Thoroughbred Record," one of that country's principal breeding papers, that well-versed writer "Salvator went for it as follows:— "Bruce Lowe, for a time, .revolutionised all previous breeding concepts by the promulgation of his Figure System which was based upon the doctrine that the merits of the modern thoroughbred are wholly due to and derived from the tap-root mares from which his Figure Families descended. "While today it seems difficult to believe it, all over the world men otherwise in their right minds and as hard-headed as they make them embraced this theory with the utmost enthusiasm—together with the basic premise upon which it was upheld. To wit —that these original tap-root mares, each and every one, possessed some mysterious hereditary endowment by virtue of which she passed on to her descendants—in the direct female line —her own original attributes, generation after generation, through all succeeding time. . "When one stops to think it over, to analyse and construe it, in the light of any and all known scientific knowledge or just plain horse sense, nothing more preposterous was ever brought before the public." "Salvator" admits that for a time the Figure System got a great hold m America, everyone singing its praises, but it was dicovered that, as with all other systems, there were holes in it. "It was wonderful," he concludes, "while it lasted, which was until the bills began to come in. When, upon looking them over, it was discovered that figures can lie—even Bruce Lowe Figures. And that mythology, when turned to base uses, is just as much of a delusion in horse-breeding as it is in history, religion, or politics.