The same thing has been observed in apples, melons, orchids, rhododendrons, grapes, maize, and peas, when one variety has been fertilized by the pollen of another, or when one species has been fertilized by the pollen of an allied but distinct species. The fruit in these cases (not simply the germ or young plant within it) has been found in some instances to have some of the colour, flavour, or shape and marking of the fertilizing variety or species blended or else mixed like a patchwork with that characteristic of the fertilized variety or species. The egg-producing or mother plant not merely has its ovules fertilized, but its tissues for some distance around are infected and made to take on--in parts of their living, growing substance--some of the quality of the fertilizing species. A similar thing occurs, though rarely, when cuttings of one plant are grafted on to another. The living tissue either of graft or of stock, and sometimes of both, is affected by the fusion with it of the tissue of the second plant united with it. And this appears to be a kind of "infection"--living particles passing from one to the other, and producing a mosaic or patchwork of the two kinds of living substance characteristic of each of the united plants. If an individual flower were to produce in a second year after its first fertilization and seed production a second set of ovules which could be fertilized by a kind of pollen differing from the first, it would not be surprising did that second set of ovules sometimes show characteristics due to the infection of the maternal tissues by the pollen used in the first year. But flowers do not survive and produce ovules in a second year. They are completely used up each year, and drop off as "fruits" from the plant which bears them. With many animals, however, the facts are otherwise. The same mother produces from the ovary year after year successive ovules, and it would thus be quite intelligible that the fertilizing sperm of one year should frequently have so affected or infected the egg-producing organ or ovary as to result in the conveyance to the later crop of egg cells separated from the ovary, some of the qualities of the earlier male parent. These considerations warrant the guess or "hypothesis" of telegony in animals. But all such guesses must be put to the proof, and not accepted simply because there is no reason to conclude that they are impossible. As things at present stand, there is no evidence, resulting either from deliberate experiment or from exact observation and record of the natural breeding of animals, to justify us in holding, as an established fact, that the offspring of a given sire and dam is, even in rare cases, affected by the previous mating of the dam with another sire. Naturalists would be deeply interested in the production of even one indisputable instance of this occurrence.