WHITE— STUDIES OF INHERITANCE IN PISUM. 499 



Plants bearing blue and round seeds, 

 Plants bearing blue and wrinkled seeds, 

 Plants bearing white and wrinkled seeds, 

 Plants bearing white and round seeds. 

 The remarkable part of Master's claim, however, is that though he 

 grew the four varieties separately for several successive years, each 

 kind always produced all four kinds mixed together. In other words, 

 not one of these varieties bred true as regards the four characters 

 mentioned, while according to most of the recent studies, wrinkled- 

 ness and green cotyledon color (blue) should be constant. White 

 (98) has recently secured results which possibly may throw some 

 light upon Alasters's claim as far as the inheritance of cotyledon 

 color is concerned. 



Though facts were apparently plentiful (such as they were), re- 

 garding the effects of environment and the heredity of characters 

 in peas and other plants, efforts to formulate them into a lazu of 

 heredity that would stand the test of experimental inquiry were, 

 prior to the studies of Mendel, apparently futile. Heredity, says 

 an old writer, is a collection of facts without laws, while Balzac 

 wrote " heredity is a maze in which science loses itself." 



Mendel's own results on the inheritnace of characters in peas were 

 published in an obscure Austrian natural history society's proceed- 

 ings, and except for a few lines in Focke's book (28) on hybrids, 

 and a bibliographical reference in Bailey's " Plant Breeding," they 

 remained lost until 1900, when the three botanists — Correns (14), 

 Tschermak (78), and de Vries (23.5) — rediscovered the law and 

 resurrected Mendel's paper from oblivion. The subsequent impetus 

 this rediscovery and resurrection gave to the scientific study of plant 

 breeding is abundantly exemplified by the thousands of papers and 

 books published since 1900 containing results of experiments on 

 hundreds of varieties of plants and breeds of animals. In corn 

 alone, the inheritance of over thirty characters has been studied and 

 found to be consistent with Mendelian principles. In tobacco, cotton, 

 sweet peas, corn, wheat, oats, and poultry results of considerable 

 practical value have been obtained by the use of Mendelian methods. 



PROC. AMER. PHIL. SOC, VOL. LVI, GG, DECEMBER lO, I917. 



