The curious phenomenon of telegony is not limited, however, to plants. Mr. Herbert Spencer drew attention, in _The Contemporary Review_ for March, 1893, to a case which has long been known to horsebreeders, and which may be said to have become classic. The facts were brought, by the Earl of Morton, to the attention of the Royal Society of Great Britain, as long ago as the year 1820. The Earl, who possessed a male quagga, said, in a letter to the President: "I tried to breed from the male quagga and a young chestnut mare of seven-eighths Arabian blood, and which had never been bred from; the result was the production of a female hybrid, now five years old, and bearing, both in her form and in her colour, very decided indications of her mixed origin. I subsequently parted with the seven-eighths Arabian mare to Sir Gore Ouseley, who has bred from her by a very fine black Arabian horse. I yesterday morning examined the produce, namely, a two-year-old filly and a one-year-old colt. They have the character of the Arabian breed as decidedly as can be expected, where fifteen-sixteenths of the blood are Arabian; and they are fine specimens of that breed; but both in their colour and in the hair of their manes they have a striking resemblance to the quagga. Their colour is bay, 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 forehead, and the dark bars across the back part of the legs." Mr. Spencer refers to an analogous case of the influence of a wild boar over the subsequent progeny of a domestic sow, and it now appears that such effects are not so uncommon as the scientific world has supposed. Professor Romanes made particular enquiries on this subject of professional and amateur breeders of animals, and he says most of his correspondents "are quite persuaded that it is of frequent occurrence, many of them regard it as a general rule, while some of them go so far as to make a point of always putting a mare, bitch, etc., to a good pedigree male in her first season, so that her subsequent progenies may be benefited by his influence, even though they be engendered by inferior sires."[87:A] His own more modest conclusion is that the evidence he obtained "is enough to prove the fact of a previous sire asserting his influence on a subsequent progeny, although this fact is one of comparatively rare occurrence."