Principles of Heredity 109 



peas not precisely the laws Professor Weldon has been 

 at the pains of drafting, but of that anon. Having done 

 so, he knew what his discovery was worth. He saw, and 

 rightly, that he had found a principle which must govern 

 a wide area of phenomena. He entitles his paper therefore 

 " Versuehe uber P flan zen- Hybrid en" or, Experiments in 

 Plant-Hybridisation. 



Nor did Mendel start at first with any particular 

 intention respecting Peas. He tells us himself that he 

 wanted to find the laws of inheritance in hybrids, which 

 he suspected were definite, and that after casting about 

 for a suitable subject, he found one in peas, for the reasons 

 he sets out. 



In another respect the question of title is much more 

 important. By the introduction of the word "Alternative' 1 

 the suggestion is made that the Mendelian principle applies 

 peculiarly to cases of "alternative' 3 inheritance. Mendel 

 himself makes no such limitation in his earlier paper, 

 though perhaps by rather remote implication in the second, 

 to which the reader should have been referred. On the 

 contrary, he wisely abstains from prejudicial consideration 

 of unexplored phenomena. 



To understand the significance of the word "alternative" 

 as introduced by Professor Weldon we must go back a 

 little in the history of these studies. In the year 1897 

 Galton formally announced the Law of Ancestral Heredity 

 referred to in the Introduction, having previously "stated 

 it briefly and with hesitation' 3 in Natural Inheritance, 

 p. 134. In 1898 Professor Pearson published his modifi- 

 cation and generalisation of Galton's Law, introducing a 

 correction of admitted theoretical importance, though it is 

 not in question that the principle thus restated is funda- 



