HISTORY OF ZOOLOGY 



45 



ideas before him. It was the vast accumulation of facts covering 

 a period of twenty years which commanded the attention of sci- 

 entists as well as the public generally. In 1858 he read a joint paper 

 with Alfred Russel AVallace, a contemporary who had reached the 

 same conclusion, on the theory of natural selection. That same year 

 Darwin published his book Origin of Species which is a classic in 

 its field and familiar to all scholars. 



' >T.:" 



Fig. 14. — Charles Darwin (1809-1882), the author of Origin of Species. (From 

 Garrison, History of Medicine, published by W. B. Saunders Company.) 



Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) was an Austrian monk who carried 

 on experiments with the breeding of garden peas in the cloister 

 garden. From his work there, he derived the original laws of 

 heredity. His results were first published in an obscure Swiss paper 

 in 1866 and were not really discovered and appreciated until 1900. 

 He was the founder of genetics. He crossed different kinds of peas 

 and found that the offspring in the first generation all resembled 

 one parent. When these oft'spring were interbred he found that 

 three-fourths of their progeny resembled one grandparent, and the 

 remainder resembled the other. From these facts he referred to 

 characteristics of the former group as dominant and those of the 

 latter as recessive. The facts which he established are now known 

 as Mendel's Laws of Heredity. 



