TELEGONY 239 



TELEGONY 



From time to time it has been said by breeders of horses and other 

 animals that females, having bred to certain sires, have subsequently thrown 

 offspring to other sires which in outward form, colour, &c., have taken after 

 the sire to which they had first been pregnant, or in other words, that the 

 influence of the first male is sometimes shown in the produce when the 

 mare is put to a different mate. To illustrate the proposition a mare 

 having bred to a donkey, her subsequent produce to a horse should present 

 some of the characters of the donkey. In explanation it is suggested that 

 the unripe eggs in the ovary of the mare at the time of the first impregna- 

 tion, as well as the one which is fertilized, are infected with the germinal 

 matter of the first sire, and rendered capable of producing foals to other 

 horses more or less like him; or, as Bruce Lorre puts it, "the dam absorbs 

 some of the nature or actual circulation of the yet unborn foal, until she 

 eventually becomes ' saturated ' with the sire's nature or blood as the 

 case may be 7 '. 



What has hitherto been regarded as the most authentic and convincing 

 experiment in this connection was performed by Lord Morton in the early 

 part of the nineteenth century. He put a chestnut mare, which had never 

 before bred, to a quagga stallion, and as a result obtained a female hybrid 

 of a dun colour which " in her form and colour bore very decided indica- 

 tions of her mixed origin". The same mare subsequently passed into the 

 hands of Sir George Ouseley, who put her to a black Arabian horse two 

 consecutive years, and produced a filly and a colt respectively which in 

 their colour and in the hair of their manes, it is said, bore a striking 

 resemblance to the quagga. Both were bay, and distinguished by a 

 " dark line along the ridge of the back, the dark stripes across the forehead, 

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

 were confined to the withers and to the part of the neck next to them. 

 Those on the filly covered nearly the whole of the neck and the back as far 

 as the flanks. The colour of her coat on the neck adjoining to the mane 

 was pale and approaching to dun, rendering the stripes there more con- 

 spicuous than those on the colt. The same pale tint appeared in a less 

 degree on the rump, and in this circumstance of the dun tint also she 

 resembled the quagga. . . . Their manes were black, that of the filly short, 

 stiff, and stood upright, and that of the colt long, but so stiff as to arch 

 upwards and to hang clear of the sides of the neck, in which circumstance it 

 resembled that of the hybrid.'' 



Prima facie this would appear to admit of the conclusion that impreg- 



