106 A Defence of Mendel's 



essence of the discovery. Of Mendel's conception of the 

 hybrid as a distinct entity with characters proper to itself, 

 apart from inheritance the most novel thing in the 

 whole paper Professor Weldon gives no word. Upon this 

 is poured an undigested mass of miscellaneous ' facts " 

 and statements from which the reader is asked to conclude, 

 first, that a proposition attributed to Mendel regarding 

 dominance of one character is not of "general"* application, 

 and finally that " all work based on Mendel's method " is 

 "vitiated' 1 by a "fundamental mistake," namely "the 

 neglect of ancestry t." 



To find a parallel for such treatment of a great theme 

 in biology we must go back to those writings of the orthodox 

 which followed the appearance of the " Origin of Species." 



On 17th December 1900 I delivered a Report to the 

 Evolution Committee of the Royal Society on the experi- 

 ments in Heredity undertaken by Miss E. R. Saunders and 

 myself. This report has been offered to the Society for 

 publication and will I understand shortly appear. In it we 

 have attempted to show the extraordinary significance of 

 Mendel's principle, to point out what in his results is 

 essential and what subordinate, the ways in which the 

 principle can be extended to apply to a diversity of more 

 complex phenomena of which some are incautiously cited 



* The words "general" and "universal" appear to be used by 

 Professor Weldon as interchangeable. Cp. Weldon, p. 235 and 

 elsewhere, with Abstract given below. 



f These words occur p. 252: "The fundamental mistake which 

 vitiates all work based upon Mendel's method is the neglect of 

 ancestry, and the attempt to regard the whole effect upon offspring pro- 

 duced by a particular parent, as due to the existence in the parent of 

 particular structural characters, &c." As a matter of fact the view 

 indicated in these last words is especially repugnant to the Mendelian 

 principle, as will be seen. 



