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 asfaras 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. 
Digitized by Microsoft® 
NN 
