62i APPENDIX B. 



We pass now to evidence not much known to the world at 

 large, but widely known in the biological world, though known 

 in so incomplete a manner as to be undervalued in it. Indeed, 

 when I name it, probably many will vent a mental pooh-pooh. 

 The fact to which 1 refer is one of which record is preserved in 

 the museum of the College of Surgeons, in the shape of paintings 

 of a foal borne by a mare not quite thoroughbred, to a sire which 

 was thoroughbred — a foal which bears the markings of the 

 quagga. The history of this remarkable foal is given by the 

 Earl of Morton, F.R.S., in a letter to the President of the Royal 

 Society (read November 23, 1820). In it he states that wishing 

 to domesticate the quagga, and having obtained a male but not a 

 female, he made an experiment. 



" I tried to breed from the male quagga and a young chestnut raare of 

 seven-eighths Arabian blood, and which had never been bred from ; the 

 result was the production of a female hybrid, now five years old, and bearing, 

 both in her form and in her colour, very decided indications of her mixed 

 origin. I subsequently parted with the seven-eighths Arabian mare to Sir 

 Gore Ouseley, who has bred from her by a very fine black Arabian horse. I 

 yesterday morning examined the produce, namely, a two-year-old filly and 

 a year-old colt. They have the character of the Arabian breed as decidedly 

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

 they are fine specimens of that breed ; but both in their colour and in the 

 hair of their manes, they have a striking resemblance to the quagga. Their 

 colour is bay, 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 forehead, and the dai'k bars across the back part of the 

 legs." * 



Lord Morton then names sundry further correspondences. 

 Dr. WoUaston, at that time President of the Royal Society, who 

 had seen the animals, testified to the correctness of his de- 

 scription, and, as shown by his remarks, entertained no doubt 

 about the alleged facts. But good reason for doubt may be 



tion of the reproductive cells. Dealing with Brown-Sequard's cases of 

 inherited epilepsy (concerning which, let me say, that I do not commit 

 myself to any derived conclusions), he says : — " In the case of epilepsy, at 

 any rate, it is easy to imagine [many of Weismann's arguments are based on 

 things 'it is easy to imagine'] that the passage of some specific organism 

 through the reproductive cells may take place, as in the case of syphilis " 

 (p. 82). Here is a sample of his reasoning. It is well known that epilepsy 

 is frequently caused by some peripheral irritation (even by the lodging of a 

 small foreign body under the skin), and that, among peripheral irritations 

 causing it, imperfect healing is one. Yet though, in Brown-Saquard's cases, 

 a peripheral irritation caused in the parent by local injury was the apparent 

 origin, Weismann chooses gratuitously to assume that the progeny were 

 infected by " some specific organism," which produced the epilepsy ! And 

 then though the epileptic virus, like the syphilitic virus, makes itself at home 

 in the egg, the parental protoplasm is not admitted ! 



* Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Soc;ety for the Year 1821, Part I, 

 pp. 20-24. 



