38 Brief Historical Notice 



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 

 emmtiatecl what we shall henceforth know as the Mendelian 

 conception of the dissociation of characters of cross-breds 

 in the formation of the germ-cells, though apparently he 

 never developed this conception. 



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 24 May, 

 Nau din'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., vin., Proc., p. xiv.) 



In 1865, the year of Mendel's communication to the 

 Brimn Society, appeared Wichura's famous treatise on his 

 experiments with Salix to which Mendel refers. There are 

 passages in this memoir which come very near Mendel's 

 principles, but it is evident from the plan of his experiments 

 that Mendel had conceived the whole of his ideas before 

 that date. 



In 1868 appeared the first edition of Darwin's Animals 

 and Plants, marking the very zenith of these studies, and 

 thenceforth the decline in the experimental investigation 

 of Evolution and the problem of Species has been steady. 

 With the rediscovery and confirmation of Mendel's work 

 by de Vries, Correns and Tschermak in 1900 a new era 

 begins. 



That Mendel's work, appearing as it did, at a moment 



