918 THE AMERICAN NATURALIST. [Vow. XXXIII. 
of 1893. At that time Spencer accepted telegony as an incon- 
testable fact, called attention to experiments made by Mr. 
Nouel upon sheep, and described in the Journal of the Royal 
Agricultural Society for 1853; to others made upon pigs by 
Daniel Giles, Esq., and reported in the Phzlosophical Transac- 
tions for 1821; and to the famous experiment of Lord Morton, 
in which a nearly full-blooded Arabian mare, having been mated 
to a quagga, by which she had a hybrid foal, subsequently bore 
to a full-blooded Arabian stallion two foals, which were said to 
simulate the markings of the quagga. He concluded : “ And 
now, in presence of these facts, what are we to say? Simply 
that they are fatal to Weismann’s hypothesis. They show that 
there is none of the alleged independence of the reproductive 
cells; but that the two sets of cells are in close communion. 
They prove that while the reproductive cells multiply and 
arrange themselves during the evolution of the embryo, some 
of their germ-plasm passes into the mass of somatic cells con- 
stituting the parental body, and becomes a permanent compo- 
nent of it. Further, they necessitate the inference that this 
introduced germ-plasm, everywhere diffused, is some of it 
included in the reproductive cells subsequently formed. And 
if we thus get a demonstration that the somewhat different 
units of a foreign germ-plasm permeating the organism, per- 
meate also the subsequently formed reproductive cells, and 
affect the structures of the individuals arising from them, the 
implication is that the like happens with those native units 
which have been made somewhat different by modified func- 
tions : there must be a tendency to inheritance of acquired 
characters.” ; 
Romanes expressed himself more cautiously. While admit- 
ting that telegony occurred, he questioned its frequent occur- 
rence, and could not accept Spencer’s explanation, nor agree 
with him that the phenomenon disproved Weismann’s doctrine 
of the isolation of the germ-plasm. 
In 1896 Dr. A. L. Bell published an article in the Journal of 
Anatomy and Physiology, in which he described several cases 
that purported to illustrate the influence of a previous sire, and 
— several experiments that he had made upon horses 
