It seems to me more probable that the gemmules affect the ovaria alone.

I remember formerly speculating, like you, on the assertion that wives grow like their husbands; but how impossible to eliminate effects of imitation and same habits of life, etc.

Your letter has interested me profoundly.
P.S .-- Since publishing I have heard of additional cases--a very good one in regard to Westphalian pigs crossed by English boar, and all subsequent offspring affected, given in "Illust.

Landwirth-Zeitung," 1868, page 143.
I have shown that mules are often striped, though neither parent may be striped,--due to ancient reversion.

Now, Fritz Muller writes to me from S.Brazil: "I have been assured, by persons who certainly never had heard of Lord Morton's mare, that mares which have borne hybrids to an ass are particularly liable to produce afterwards striped ass-colts." So a previous fertilisation apparently gives to the subsequent offspring a tendency to certain characters, as well as characters actually possessed by the first male.
In the reprint (not called a second edition) of my "Domestic Animals" I give a good additional case of subsequent progeny of hairless dog being hairy from effects of first impregnation.
P.S.2nd.