Your Committee invited me to talk to you and confirm that the era of animal breeding was over. Ten years ago that subject might have been mildly interesting, but meanwhile nutrition, pathology and even physiology have also lost their independent existence in the field of animal production. This, I assume, you will take for granted. On a superficial view, therefore, one might say that the era during which all these subjects made their separate approaches to animal production problems was over. But there is a wider sense in which our traditional thinking has become obsolete.