Biographical Notice 315 



not in itself explain why the work was not noticed. Such 

 a circumstance has seldom long delayed general recognition. 

 The cause is unquestionably to be found in that neglect of 

 the experimental study of the problem of Species which 

 supervened on the general acceptance of the Darwinian 

 doctrines. The problem of Species, as Kolreuter, Gartner, 

 Naudin, Wichura, and the other hybridists conceived it, 

 attracted thenceforth no workers. The question, it was 

 imagined, had been answered and the debate ended. No 

 one felt much interest in the matter. A host of other lines 

 of work were suddenly opened up, and in 1865 the more 

 original investigators naturally found those new methods of 

 research more attractive than the tedious observations of 

 the hybridisers, whose inquiries were supposed, moreover, 

 to have led to no definite result. 



Nevertheless the total neglect of such a discovery is not 

 easy to account for. Those who are acquainted with the 

 literature of this branch. of inquiry will know that the French 

 Academy offered a prize in 1861 to be awarded in 1862 on 

 the subject " Iitudier les Hy brides ve'ge'taux au point de vue 

 de leur fe'condite' et de la perpe'tuite' de leurs caracteres" 

 This subject was doubtless chosen with reference to the 

 experiments of Godron of Nancy and Naudin, then of Paris. 

 Both these naturalists competed, and the accounts of the 

 work of Godron on Datura and of Naudin on a number 

 of species were published in the years 1864 and 1865 

 respectively. Both, especially the latter, are works of high 

 consequence in the history of the science of heredity. In 

 the latter paper Naudin clearly enunciated what we shall 

 henceforth know as the Mendelian conception of the disso- 

 ciation of characters of cross-breds in the formation of the 

 germ-cells, though apparently he never developed this con- 

 ception. 



In the year 1864, George Bentham, then President of 

 the Linnean Society, took these treatises as the subject of 

 his address to the Anniversary meeting on the 24th May, 

 Naudin's work being known to him from an abstract, the 

 full paper having not yet appeared. Referring to the 

 hypothesis of dissociation which he fully described, he said 

 that it appeared to be new and well supported, but required 

 much more confirmation before it could be held as proven. 

 (J. Linn. Soc. Bot. vm. Proc. p. xiv.) 



