We are captured or imprisoned along the historical timeline, totally beyond our control. We are unable to slip along time, unable to freely visit different eras in time. We have no awareness of nor control over the unique moment in time when we are born, but at that moment, we become fixed in time and our very thoughts and beliefs are shaped by our position in history. The beliefs, prejudices, philosophies that exist in the era of our lives are, by the luck of the draw, instrumental in our formation. Time is like an ongoing train, we are merely passengers helplessly carried along for a brief portion of the journey. The end of the long journey of time lies far toward infinity beyond our short ride. Each of us must wrestle with, throw off the shackles of falsity, find the true paths and reconcile the truths, untruths, falsehoods, lies of the era in which we are born, before we can meaningfully contribute to mankind's ongoing body of knowledge.

The Arrogance of Time

If a horseman can be sufficiently perceptive, the teachings of the past can determine the horseman's future successes. The arrogance of time prevents a horseman from having access to more than just brief and superficial learning from the body of surviving fragments of hard-won experience and knowledge, the combined and accumulated achievement and intelligence of history's best horsemen. Imagine walking with giants! But we cannot walk beside Edward Stanley, the 17th Lord Derby, while making his rounds with his trainer, George Lambton, Walter Alston, his bloodlines advisor, John Griffiths, his stud manager, his foreman, and the stable lads listening with rapt attention to the conversation. We cannot sit at the table in the tavern, during one of Tesio's visits to England, with Walter Alston, John Griffiths, Lord Derby, and Federico Tesio as they debated over drinks, the merits of a breeding theory or a new sire prospect or the latest broodmare prospect. We cannot ride on the ship with the great Australian theorist, Bruce Lowe, as he sails to Sacramento, California with a consignment of blooded horses bound for James Ben Ali Haggins' Rancho del Paso. We might be in conversation as he gazed out over the rail at the Pacific's waves excited with anticipation at the possibility of someday publishing the years of research in a book on breeding, perhaps titled, "Breeding Race Horse by the Figure System", so that future horsemen could avoid some of the pitfalls and blind alleys in breeding great racehorses. He might be pleased at looking out over the rich grasses in the bottoms along the American River east of where it joins the Sacramento or wondering where he would find the publisher, the money to publish or whether his health would hold so he could follow up on some of those unfinished details... Past is prologue.

I thought that it might be useful to speculate and perhaps establish to a degree some of the motivations, state of knowledge, and the intellectual climate that shaped the thinking of Bruce Lowe. To this end I compiled a chronology of significant pre-Darwinian and pre-Mendelian historical events, primarily so I could achieve a better grasp of the intellectual climate surrounding Bruce Lowe during the time of his research and creation of his main body of work. I found a book, "Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist" by Vitezslav Orel, Emeritus Head, The Mendelianum, Brno, Czech Republic, translated by Stephen Finn, Oxford University Press (ISBN 0 19 854774 9) 1996 The second chapter is an essay entitled, "Heredity before Mendel" that usefully presents a capsule of early research and thinking on heredity and inheritance prior to Gregor Mendel. In addition, the writings of Colonel John F. Wall, in "Breeding Thoroughbreds", Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1946, Thomas Henry Taunton's four volume set, "Portraits of Celebrated Race Horses (of the Past and Present Centuries)", Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, London, 1887, "Cope's Royal Cavalcade of the Turf", by Alfred Cope, published for David Cope Ltd., by Cope's Publications Ltd., London, 1953 contributed to this research.

The following are some of the significant and influential events that led up to and possibly shaped Bruce Lowe's weltanschauung He was an original, creative, intellectual giant that chose to make his contribution to the selective breeding of the Thoroughbred horse, while rubbing shoulders with his contemporaries, the giants of science: Darwin, Mendel, and the other researchers, all coming to grips with the rational world in this period of the great flowering of all natural sciences.

Throughout history, farmers have deliberately selected and crossed animals and plants in order to obtain higher-yielding forms, but little mention of their practical knowledge has been made in early literature. Selection of individuals or combinations of selection and crossing was pragmatic and agriculturalists were not too concerned with the ongoing debate over theory among biologists. The agriculturists based their practices on observation of variability of traits and their combination by crossing. "At that time, few pure naturalists (natural scientists, biologists, or researchers) took into account the empirical knowledge acquired in agriculture." (-Orel, page 7) In early times, agricultural practices were parallel endeavors, isolated and separate from the speculation of scientists, apparently with little interaction between the pragmatic empiricists and the theoretical scientists.

The direct line of intellectual inquiry and speculation ran from Aristotle, Christian Carl André, J.K. Nestler, Count E. Festetics to Bruce Lowe, and, probably helped him formulate the essential role of maternal contribution. I would speculate that because of the importance of large-scale sheep breeding to the economy of Australia, that such research papers and breeding information would be in relatively common circulation in Australia in the middle 1800's. Lowe (and his friend and co-researcher Frank Reynolds, a large-scale Australian breeder) would have to have at least some everyday familiarity with this research. Lowe, after all was a judge of livestock. His genius would be to take these elements from disparate sources along with his knowledge of the Thoroughbred race horse and extensive historical data and formulate a unique maternal theory of inheritance in the Thoroughbred.

Bruce Lowe's categorization of Thoroughbred female families and matrilineal descent in my view is not only correct in most of its principle points, but most useful to the breeder of race horses. In terms of the aspects of his work now known to be incorrect, I would remind you that he figured all this out before the work of Gregor Mendel was commonly known. Darwin's "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection" was published in 1859. It was just becoming widely known and extremely controversial. By no means was it the accepted view of the biological sciences. As previously stated, Darwin could not explain heredity, stating that the laws of inheritance are largely unknown. Lowe was an educated and well-traveled man, even though he lived in a relatively remote part of the world, less accessible to the leading edge of science in Europe and Britain. In my humble opinion, Bruce Lowe (1845-1894) belongs right up there close to Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882) and Gregor Johann Mendel (1822-1884). We will never know how much his frail health, increasing blindness, and ongoing disease (possibly diabetes?) compromised his intellectual prowess or research, especially toward the end, when apparently others were helping research many of the details. He died before his manuscript was finished and his original research was discredited to a certain extent when other, less gifted researchers were left to defend his work, but it has taken cytogeneticists and sophisticated biological research nearly one hundred years to catch up with his brilliance.

It would be useful to gain a greater understanding of the forces along the timeline instrumental in shaping Bruce Lowe's thinking and achievements. What nineteenth century influences where there upon the intellectual development of Bruce Lowe?

This nineteenth century's age of enlightenment was alive with creativity, scientific excitement, and great ideas. Mankind was coming to grips with the natural world in new intellectually stimulating exploration of the physical world.

Nineteenth century Australia was at once the wild frontier of an independent and spirited people, but also its destiny was never too far from Great Britain. This was the land where a man had his freedom and with hard work, his opportunity for fame and fortune. In some ways, the Australian, Bruce Lowe, the ground-breaker, was a solitary thinker, intellectually isolated as he was away from the major European centers of scientific inquiry as well as the home of the English Thoroughbred. The distance had to be a stimulus to a gifted thinker, perhaps hungry for support for his ideas. He had the means and was restless enough to travel extensively in pursuit of his love (obsession) of the Thoroughbred, his vocation as a bloodstock agent and advisor, and in search of the answers to the problems of breeding great racehorses. Some of the theories he developed reflected accepted, current thinking of the nineteenth century for good or bad . Thought and theory of that era now discredited were commonly accepted.

Major changes in the way of scientific inquiry were occurring worldwide. As John Wilks explains, in reference to Charles Darwin, "(There was) a major shift in the nature of science generally from a state of patronage and subordination to ecclesiastical orthodoxy to one of professional independence and government funding." Lowe was a well-informed man with a strong interest in science.

Mendelian genetics flowered at the turn of the century, but it was long after Lowe's death. Even then it was controversial. Briefly, those geneticists argued that Darwinian evolution (natural selection) was dead. Darwinism did not become an orthodox view of biology until 1930 when Mendelism and Darwinism were finally reconciled. A common view from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and into the nineteenth centuries was that use and disuse of a trait would either strengthen or weaken its inheritance in descendants. This is often referred to as a Lamarckian (Lamarckism) view of inheritance the most widely accepted theory up until the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics in 1900, six years after Bruce Lowe died. Lamarckism still had very limited support up until the 1950's. Charles Darwin accepted that use and disuse would affect heredity. He developed the theory of pangenesis to explain inheritance. His term for the factors passing heritable information is pangenes, later shortened to genes upon development of Mendelian genetics. Only in the last two decades has science been able to satisfactorily confirm much of Lowe's writings of maternal contribution. Bruce Lowe was 120 years ahead of his time.

Charles Darwin's friend, Joseph Hooker extensively traveled in his research on geographical distribution, visited Australia and New Zealand in 1839 - 1843. Lowe was educated and well read; could this be a possible intellectual connection with Bruce Lowe?

Darwin's initial inspiration was from a reading in 1838 of Malthus' Essay on the Principle of Population.

Darwin realized that unchecked growth would outstrip the food supply and therefore not all that were born could survive leading to the struggle for existence. Darwin wrote the opening line in his Essay of 1844,

"De Candolle, in an eloquent passage, has declared that all nature is at war, one organism with another, or with external nature."

The "struggle for existence" was a common and popular theme of the nineteenth century. In a poem by Tennyson written in 1850 the often quoted phrase: "nature red in tooth and claw" is evidence for the metaphor and theme of biological struggle for survival.

Capitalist laissez fairre competition was another dominant force in the thinking of the times. Adam Smith (1723 - 1790), the Scottish economist published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, a seminal work of free market economy and survival of trading bodies and manufacturers as a result of the pursuit of enlightened self-interest. Darwin, who had read Smith and his followers, was not unaware of the analogy between the survival of the corporation through successful trading and the survival of a hereditary lineage through advantageous traits.

Darwin developed his mechanism of evolution, selection, from an analogy with the processes of selection by breeders for desirable traits. The breeding practices and artificial selection of animal husbandry provided the inspiration for Darwin's concepts of "natural selection" and, later, the natural philosopher, Herbert Spencer's (1820 - 1903) contributing phrase, "survival of the fittest." Spencer was ridiculed by Darwin and his colleague, the English biologist, Thomas Henry Huxley (1825 - 1895) for the absence of facts in his philosophy of nature. Huxley once said that Spencer's idea of a tragedy was a deduction spoiled by a fact.

Evolution, in the second half of the nineteenth century, as it spread throughout the world, was based on analogy of the development and life-cycle of a single organism (ontogeny) and that of a species (phylogeny). This version, in disagreement with Darwin, held that species had a life-cycle and each lineage of species was predetermined in the stages through which it would pass. Haeckel developed his now discredited "biogenetic law" that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Even Darwin's pangenes, an alternate explanation of inheritance were eventually discredited without diminishing the major contribution of his works.