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of heredity were discovered in peas by Gregor Mendel, after eight 
years or more of experimenting. This happened in 1865. That 
is, Mendel set forth the results of his experiments and the con- 
clusions he drew from them in a paper he read before a local 
scientific society in Brunn, Austria (now Czechoslovakia), 
1865. In 1866 the paper was published in the Proceedings of ee 
Society and sent to over one hundred and twenty libraries. But 
few people who understood the publication’s significance ap- 
parently ever saw it. Darwin never did, neither did Galton, the 
father of eugenics. So it was all but buried. Mendel died 
eighteen years later, a disappointed old man. In 1Igoo, three 
European botanists rediscovered the laws, independently of each 
other, and then the study of heredity as a science under the name 
of “ genetics” really began. Almost any up-to-date text book on 
botany or zoology will tell more of this story and in greater detail. 
In two Brooklyn Botanic Garden Leaflets recently issued, the 
details are more complete. Strange to say, two of the redis- 
coverers were also working with peas, while one was experiment- 
ing with corn. 
When it became so apparent that these laws controlled in part 
the destinies of numerous species of plants and animals, it was 
but natural to attempt their application to man. They fitted. 
Eye-color in people, though of course a quite different char- 
acter, is inherited in the same manner as eye-color in peas. But 
people are difficult material with which to do anything. They 
are not subject to direct experimentation. So information con- 
cerning them must be accumulated statistically by specially 
trained data collectors. Instead of gathering their information 
from fields of pedigreed peas, the ancestral characters of which 
have been accurately recorded on the spot for several genera- 
tions, these students and investigators add to their own direct 
observations often by depending on the recollections and im- 
perfect knowledge of the members of the families whose heredity 
they are trying to unravel. But, by gathering large quantities 
of information they tend to neutralize the effect of its less de- 
sirable quality. If among a thousand families, involving three to 
four generations in each, nine hundred and ninety of them tell 
the same story as regards the inheritance of eye-color, for ex- 
