Quaggas, Coiled Oysters, and Flimsy Facts 
False views are fun to disprove, but a false fact 
may become a long-lived burden for science 
by Stephen Jay Gould 
As Darwin cataloged cases of striped 
horses and asses to illustrate a common 
ancestry with zebras, he inevitably en- 
countered one of the most famous ani- 
mals of nineteenth-century natural his- 
tory — the Earl of Morton’s mare. Dar- 
win wrote in the Origin of Species: “In 
Lord Moreton’s [s/c] famous hybrid 
from a chestnut mare and male quagga, 
the hybrid, and even the pure offspring 
subsequently produced from the mare 
by a black Arabian sire, were much 
more plainly barred across the legs than 
is even the pure quagga.” 
The quagga, a zebra with stripes re- 
stricted to its neck and forequarters, is 
now extinct, it was not thriving in the 
early nineteenth century either, when 
the good Earl hoped to save the species 
by domesticating it. He was able to pro- 
cure a male for his noble experiment 
but could never obtain a female. So he 
bred his male quagga with “a young 
chestnut mare of seven-eighths Arabi- 
an blood,” and obtained a hybrid with 
“very decided indications of her mixed 
origin.” Nothing surprising so far. 
But the disappointed Lord Morton, 
unable to find more quaggas, sold his 
Arabian mare to Sir Gore Ouseley, who 
proceeded to breed her with “a very 
fine black Arabian horse.” When Lord 
Morton visited his friend and viewed 
the two offspring of pedigreed Arabian 
parents, he was astonished to note in 
them what he took to be a “striking re- 
semblance to the quagga.” Somehow, 
the quagga father had influenced subse- 
quent offspring sired by other males 
years after his permanent departure 
from the life of Lord Morton’s mare. 
How could such an influence be main- 
tained long after physical contact had 
ceased? 
Lord Morton’s mare represents the 
most celebrated, but by no means the 
only, case of a phenomenon that Ger- 
man biologist August Weismann later 
named “telegony,” from Greek roots 
meaning “offspring at a distance,” or 
the idea that sires could influence sub- 
A 
sequent progeny not fathered by them. 
Since the supposed phenomenon turn- 
ed out to be an illusion, telegony now 
reposes as one more forgotten item on 
history’s ash heap, and neither Lord 
Morton nor his mare retain any notori- 
ety today. 
But historian of science Richard W. 
Burkhardt, Jr., who recently wrote an 
excellent article on the history of teleg- 
ony in general and Lord Morton’s mare 
in particular ( Studies in History of Biol- 
ogy, vol. 3, 1979, pp. 1-21), has demon- 
strated that telegony was once a major 
subject for research and “inspired the 
most extensive work in experimental 
animal breeding conducted in Britain 
between Darwin’s death in 1882 and 
the rediscovery of Mendel’s law in 
1900.” Darwin himself was a major 
supporter of telegony. 
If the supposed causes of telegony 
are a bit mysterious, Darwin’s reasons 
for espousing the idea may seem equal- 
ly difficult to fathom. After all, he first 
discussed the progeny of Lord Mor- 
ton’s mare in a different context that 
implied an explanation opposed to te- 
legony. As I wrote in my last two col- 
umns (this, I promise, is the last word 
for a while on zebra stripes), Darwin 
had cataloged all cases he could find of 
asses and true horses with stripes. And 
he had uncovered a bounty. He used his 
striped horses as an effective argument 
for evolution: If God had created true 
horses, asses, and zebras as separate 
forms, why should species that normal- 
ly do not have stripes develop them 
quite frequently? Does not this latent 
tendency for striping in all horses (per- 
manently actualized only in zebras) in- 
dicate common descent? In this con- 
text, why did Darwin later implicate 
the previous quagga sire in the striping 
of subsequent offspring from Lord 
Morton’s mare? In this first discussion, 
quagga 
16 
