ISO TELEGONY 



to give telegony the best possible chance of declaring itseil, a;*j 

 although he has displayed his scientific mood in abstaining from 

 dogmatic conclusion, and in suggesting many other experiments 

 which should be made, there is no ambiguity in his verdict that 

 the evidence of any undoubted telegony is very unsatisfactory. 

 The Penycuik experiments proved this, at least that telegony 

 does not generally occur, even when what were considered to 

 be favourable conditions were secured ; indeed, anything sug- 

 gestive of telegony occurred only in a very small percentage 

 of cases. Moreover, where peculiar phenomena of inheritance 

 were observed, they seemed to be readily explicable on the 

 reversion hypothesis. 



The general nature of the experiments may be understood by 

 taking one of the best cases, which loses much, however, when 

 summarised apart from the beautiful pictures illustrating the 

 book (Ewart, 1899). A Rum pony mare, Mulatto, of remarkably 

 pure breed, was served by a Burchell zebra stallion, Matopo, 

 and the result in August, 1896, was Romulus, whose markings 

 were quite different from those of his sire, being suggestive rather 

 of the Somaliland zebra. In 1897 Mulatto had a bay colt fo^.l 

 to a grey Arab stallion, and this foal unfortunately short- 

 lived gave no proof of telegony. The stripes which most 

 frequently occur in horses were absent ; there were others which 

 are not uncommon in horses ; but the most distinct markings 

 (not that any were strongly developed) namely, those across 

 the croup were of a sort extremely rare in both foals and horses. 

 In short, the markings of Mulatto's second foal were puzzling, 

 but in no definite way suggestive of the influence of the previous 

 zebra sire. In this, as in the other cases, the verdict as to the 

 occurrence of telegony was " non-proven." 



In regard to experiments it should be remembered, however, 

 that if telegony (supposing it to be a fact) be due to some strange 

 persistence or unusual influence of the spermatozoa of a previous 

 sire, then many isolated, cases with negative results do not prove 



