470 



ANIMAL BIOLOGY 



thus secured in regard to the inheritance of certain characters, such 

 as the form and color of the seeds in Peas. His work was published 

 in 1865 in an obscure natural history periodical, and he abandoned 

 teaching and research to become the Abbot of his monastery. Thus 

 terminated prematurely the scientific work of one of the epoch- 

 makers of biology, and the now famous Mendelian laws of inherit- 

 ance were unknown to science until 1900, when other biologists, 



Fig. 306. — Gregor Johann Mendel. 



coming to similar results, unearthed his forty-year-old paper. 

 (Figs. 183, 306.) 



We have already seen that the fundamental principle of the 

 segregation of the genes during the development of the gametes, 

 which Mendel's work indicated, has been extended to other plants 

 and to animals, and that instead of being, as at first thought, a 

 principle of rather limited application, appears to be the key to all 

 inheritance. And the present results are extremely convincing 

 because cytological studies on the architecture of the chromosome 

 complex of the germ cells keep pace with, and afford a picture of 

 the physical basis of inheritance — the mechanism by which the 

 segregation and independent assortment of characters by the Men- 

 delian formula takes place. Such is the deeply hidden kernel of truth 

 in the old preformation theories. (Fig. 167.) 



