Page:EB1911 - Volume 26.djvu/538

Rh From this school he passed to the Elphinstone College, of which he became a fellow, and after taking the degree of M.A. and LL.B., decided to follow the example of Bal Mangesh Wagle, the first Indian admitted by the judges to practise on the original side of the high court, a position more like the status of a barrister. than a vakil or pleader. He passed the examination and was enrolled in 1872. His learning and other gifts soon brought him an extensive practice. He had complete command of. the English language, and his intimacy with Sanskrit enabled him to study and quote the Hindu law-books with an ease not readily attained by European counsel. Telang, finding his career assured, declined an offer of official employment. But in 1889 he accepted a seat on the high court bench, where his judgments are recognized as authoritative, especially on the Hindu law. He was syndic of the university from 1881, and vice-chancellor from 1892 till his death. In that year also he was elected president of the local branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. These two offices had never been held by a native of India before. The decoration of C.I.E. conferred on him in 1882 was a recognition of his services as a member of a mixed commission appointed by the government to deal with the educational system of the whole of India. He was nominated to the local legislative council in 1884, but declined a similar position on the viceroy's council. Along with P.M. Metha, he was the originator of the Bombay Presidency Association. When a student he had won the Bhugwandas scholarship in Sanskrit, and in this language his later studies were profound. His translation of the Bhagwadgita into English prose and verse is a standard work; and he criticized Professor Weber's hypothesis that the story of the Ramayana was influenced by the Homeric epics. While devoted to the sacred classics of the Hindus, Telang did not neglect his own vernacular, Mahratti literature being enriched by his translation of Lessing's Nathan the Wise, and an essay on Social Compromise. He died at Bombay on the 1st of September 1893.

 TELAV, a town of Russian Transcaucasia, in the government of Tiflis, 63 m. N.E. of the town of Tiflis, on the river Alazan and at an altitude of 2420 ft. Pop. (1897) 11,810, chiefly Armenians (9000) and Georgians (2000). Telav is a very old town, founded in 893, and until 1797 it was the capital of Kakhetia, and has ruins of old forts. In the neighbourhood are the Ikaltoi monastery (6th century), the Shuanty monastery (16th century), and the originally 10th century Alaverdi church, visited by many pilgrims. Wine is exported.  TELEGONY (Gr., far, and , offspring), the name now given to the hypothesis that offspring sometimes inherit characters from a previous mate of their dam. Until recent years the supposed inheritance of characters acquired by a dam from one or more of her former mates was usually designated by breeders “throwing back”; by physiologists, “infection of the germ,” or simply “infection.” The doctrine of “infection,” like the somewhat allied doctrine of “maternal impressions,” seems to be alike ancient and widespread. Evidence of the antiquity of the belief in “maternal impressions” we have in Jacob placing peeled rods before Laban's cattle to induce them to bring forth “ring-straked speckled and spotted” offspring; evidence of the antiquity of the “infection” doctrine we have, according to some writers, in the practice amongst the Israelites of requiring the childless widow to marry her deceased husband's brother, that he might “raise up seed to his brother.” Whatever may have been the views of stock owners in the remote past, it is certain that during the middle ages the belief in “infection” was common amongst breeders, and that during the last two centuries it met with the general approval of naturalists, English breeders being especially satisfied of the fact that the offspring frequently inherited some of their characters from a former mate of the dam, while both English and Continental naturalists (apparently without putting the assertions of breeders to the test of experiment) accounted for the “throwing back” by saying the germ cells of the dam had been directly or indirectly “infected” by a former mate. It is noteworthy that L. Agassiz, C. Darwin,

W. B. Carpenter, and G. J. Romanes were all more or less firm believers in the doctrine of infection, and that a few years ago, with the exception of Professor A. Weismann, all the leading biologists had either subscribed to the telegony doctrine or admitted that “infection of the germ” was well within the bounds of possibilities. Even Professor Weismann did not deny the possibility of the offspring throwing back to a previous mate. The widespread belief, he admitted, “may be justifiable and founded on fact,” but he was careful to add that “only the confirmation of the tradition by methodical investigation, in this case by experiment, could raise telegony to the rank of a fact.” In assuming this attitude Professor Weismann decidedly differed from Herbert Spencer, who some years ago mentioned that he had evidence “enough to prove the fact of a previous sire asserting his influence on a subsequent progeny.”

The importance of determining whether there is such a thing as telegony is sufficiently evident. If a mare or other female animal is liable to be “infected” by her first or by subsequent mates, telegony will rank as a cause of variation, and breeders will be justified in believing (1) that pure-bred females are liable to be “corrupted” when mated with sires of a different breed; and (2) that inferior or cross-bred females, if first mated with a high-class sire, will thereafter produce superior offspring, however inferior or cross-bred her subsequent mates. If, on the other hand, “infection of the germ” is impossible, telegony will not count as a factor in variation, and breeders will no longer be either justified in regarding mares and other female animals as liable to be “corrupted” by ill-assorted unions, or benefited by first having offspring to a high-class, or it may be more vigorous, mate. Though, according to breeders, evidence of telegony has been found in nearly all the different kinds of domestic mammals and birds, most stress has been laid on instances of “infection” in the horse and dog families.

Telegony in the Horse Family.—Beecher at the end of the 17th century pointed out that “when a mare has had a mule by an ass and afterwards a foal by a horse, there are evident marks on the foal of the mother having retained some ideas of her former paramour, the ass.” That mares used in mule breeding are liable to be infected is still widely believed, but irrefragable evidence of the influence of the ass persisting, as Agassiz assumed, is conspicuous by its absence. Darwin says, “It is worth notice that farmers in south Brazil. . . are convinced that mares which have once borne mules when subsequently put to horses are extremely liable to produce colts striped like a mule” (Animals and Plants, vol. i. p. 436). Baron de Parana, on the other hand, says, “I have many relatives and friends who have large establishments for the rearing of mules, where they obtain from 400 to 1000 mules in a year. In all these establishments, after two or three crossings of the mare and ass, the breeders cause the mare to be put to a horse; yet a pure-bred foal has never been produced resembling either an ass or a mule.”

The prevalence of the belief in telegony at the present day is largely due to a case of supposed infection reported to the Royal Society in 1820 by Lord Morton. A chestnut mare, after having a hybrid by a quagga, produced to a black Arabian horse three foals showing a number of stripes—in one more stripes were present than in the quagga hybrid. The more, however, the case so intimately associated with the name of Lord Morton is considered, the less convincing is the evidence it affords in favour of “infection.” Stripes are frequently seen in high-caste Arab horses, and cross-bred colts out of Arab mares sometimes present far more distinct bars across the legs and other zebra-like markings than characterized the subsequent offspring of Lord Morton's seven-eighths Arabian mare. In the absence of control experiments there is therefore no reason for assuming Lord Morton's chestnut mare would have produced less striped offspring had she been mated with the black Arabian before giving birth to a quagga hybrid. To account for the stripes on the subsequent foals, it is only necessary (now that the principles of cross-breeding are better understood) to assume that in the cross-bred chestnut mare there lay latent the characteristics of the Kattiawar or other