PLANT HYBRIDIZATION BEFORE MENDEL 211 



works of Kolreuter, Gartner, Wichura, and Wiegmann, whose 

 works were much more voluminous and pretentious in the field 

 which they occupied, receive appropriate consideration, as do 

 also Naudin's and Godron's prize contributions : but Mendel's 

 paper evidently appeared to F'ocke simply in the guise of one of 

 the numerous, apparently similar, contributions to the knowledge 

 of the results of crossing within some single group. The works 

 of Kolreuter and Gartner, for example, are regarded simply and 

 without question as attempts to compass the sphere of hybridiza- 

 tion phenomena as a whole, and from a much broader standpoint. 

 It was supposedly not at all conceivable, that the laws of hybrid 

 breeding could be compassed within a series of experiments upon 

 a single plant. Whatever experiments Mendel therefore reported 

 were to be considered, like the experiments of Knight and others, 

 merely for whatever obvious data they seemed conspicuously to 

 present. Focke's work is, however, an excellent compendium of 

 all the experiments in crossing done up to 1881. The details of 

 his data are laborious, exact, well classified and scientifically 

 arranged, comprising 79 families of Dicotyledons, 13 families of 

 Monocotyledons, 2 families of Gymnosperms, 2 of Pteridophytes, 

 1 of the Musci, and 1 of the Algae. 



It is interesting, in view of the fact that Focke's publication con- 

 stitutes the only actual epitome, in cyclopaedic form, of the hybrid- 

 ization experiments carried on up to his time, to note the relative 

 number of references to the different more important names, as 

 follows: Gartner, 409; Kolreuter, 214; Herbert, 155; Godron, 

 102; Naudin, 89 ; Darwin, 34; Knight, 32; Caspary, 31; Wieg- 

 mann, 30; Nageli, 28; Lecoq, 26; Wichura, 20; Linnaeus, 21; 

 Mendel, 1^; Hoffmann, 14; Sageret, 10; Shirreff, 3; Rimpau, 2; 

 Seton and Goss, 1 each. 



The fifteen references to Mendel's name occur on the following 

 pages and in the following connections : 



