No. 396.] FACTS AND THEORIES OF TELEGONY. 919 
and dogs for the express purpose of producing results which 
might be attributed to the influence of telegony. In the same 
year Karl Pearson examined the matter statistically, and 
showed that in man there was no evidence that the younger 
children of a family have characters more nearly resembling 
those of the father than do the eldest, for it is evident that if 
telegony really occurs the later offspring of the “infected” 
mother would resemble the father more than would the first- 
born. 
Mr. Bulman has more recently called attention to the bear- 
ing that “hybrid-oölogy ” has upon the question of telegony. 
The eggs deposited by a female bird of a certain species, after 
she has been mated to a male of another species, will often 
resemble, in their coloration, the eggs of the latter species. 
This fact, which appears to be well established, has been 
thought to prove that the sperm influences not the ovum alone, 
but the walls of the oviduct, which in turn imprint their ac- 
quired character upon the eggshell. It seems to the writer, 
however, that one is not driven to accept such a phenomenon 
as an instance of ‘‘maternal infection.: The hen’s egg is not 
the product of the undirected metabolic activity of the hen 
alone, but is the result of the joint activity of the combined 
oocyte and sperm, — the odsperm, — and the coverings of the 
egg, the membranes and shell, in their elaboration, must be 
affected as well by the centrifugal influence of the odsperm as 
by the centripetal influence of the oviducal walls. The egg 
takes unto itself what it selects, not merely what is thrust 
upon it. 
A paper strongly in favor of telegony, and partially based 
upon experiments, was written by Mr. Frank Finn, at the 
time of the Spencer-Weismann controversy, and published in 
Natural Science. The observations therein recorded, especially 
those upon varieties of the domestic fowl, are exceedingly 
interesting, and one would almost become convinced, had the 
experiments been made for the express purpose of securing 
definite data bearing upon the disputed question, and had ade- 
quate precautions been taken for the exclusion of errors. But 
it is this very lack of definite data, and the frequent admission 
