SOME BELIEFS OF PRACTICAL BREEDERS 565 



It is of course possible that motives other than belief in telegony 

 have had some influence in shaping these rules, but presumably this 

 belief has been the chief reason for adopting them. At the same time 

 it must be acknowledged that the popular belief in telegony is by no means 

 universal. Thus E. Davenport calls attention to the fact that breeders of 

 dogs are generally credited with a strong belief in telegony. Nevertheless 

 a correspondence which he carried on with dog fanciers failed to disclose 

 more than one case among thirty-seven which affirmed belief in telegony, 

 and twenty-eight of these breeders were positively opposed to it. Since 

 some credence is still given to telegony in popular circles, even if not 

 among scientific investigators, a detailed account of the evidence against 

 it will be presented below. 



Lord Morton's Quagga Hybrids.' We can do no better in beginning a 

 discussion of telegony than to refer to the classic example of it, Lord 

 Morton's mare, for this case was accepted at its face value by no less 

 an authority than Darwin. 



The details of this experiment are about as follows. Lord Morton 

 bred a seven-eighths chestnut Arabian mare which had never been bred 

 before to a male quagga. The result of the union was a female hybrid 

 which plainly exhibited both in color and in form distinct evidence of its 

 hybrid origin. The mare subsequently passed into the hands of Sir 

 Gore Ouseley who bred her to a very fine black Arabian stallion. To the 

 service of this stallion she bore first a filly foal and in the next year a 

 colt foal. Lord Morton later examined these two colts and as a result 

 of his inspection he wrote as follows to the president of the Royal Society : 



The 2-year-old filly and yearling colt have the character of the Arabian breed 

 as decidedly as can be expected where fifteen-sixteenths of the blood are Arabian; 

 they are fine specimens of that breed, but both in the color and in the hair of their 

 manes they have a striking resemblance to the quagga. Their color is very marked, 

 more or less like the quagga in a darker tint. Both are distinguished by the dark 

 line along the ridge of the back, the dark stripes across the forehand, and the dark 

 bars across the back part of the legs. The dark stripes across the forehand of the colt are 

 confined to the withers and to the part of the neck next to them. Those on the filly cover 

 nearly the whole of the neck and the back as far as the flanks. The color of her coat on 

 the neck adjoining to the mane is pale and approaching to dun, rendering the stripes 

 more conspicuous than those on the colt. The same pale tint appears in a less degree 

 on the rump, and in this circumstance of the dun tint also she resembles the quagga. 



Both their manes are black; that of the filly is short, stiff, and stands upright, and 

 Sir Gore Ouseley's stud groom alleged that it never was otherwise. That of the 

 colt is long, but so stiff as to arch upward and to hang clear of the sides of the neck, 

 in which circumstance it resembles that of the hybrid. This is the more remarkable, 

 as the manes of the Arabian breed hang lank, and closer to the neck than those of 

 most others. The bars across the legs, both of the hybrid and of the colt and filly, 

 are more strongly defined and darker than those on the legs of the quagga, which are 

 very slightly marked; and though the hybrid has several quagga marks, which the 

 colt and filly have not, yet the most striking namely, the stripes on the forehand are 

 fewer and less apparent than those on the colt and filly. 



