OTHER MENDELIAN CHARACTERS 25 



The Lard- and soft-podded varieties were also 

 known to Gerarde. He recognised '' Some with 

 tough skins or membranes on the cods, and others 

 have none at all, whose cods are to be eaten with 

 the Peason, when they are young, as those of Kidney 

 Beans." 



Mendel crossed these two forms and found 

 that the hybrid resulting from a cross between 

 a hard- and a soft-podded pea was hard-podded. 

 It has since been found that the pod of the hybrid 

 is never so hard as that of the hard-podded parent. 

 But this point requires further investigation, and 

 need not concern us here. The second hybrid 

 generation raised by Mendel from these hybrids 

 consisted of 882 plants with hard pods and 299 

 plants with soft pods. A hundred of the hard- 

 podded plants were tested by sowing ten seeds of 

 each of them. Twenty-nine of them produced hard- 

 podded plants only ; seventy- one produced families 

 in which both hard-podded and soft-podded plants 

 occurred — a tolerably close approximation to the 

 Mendelian expectation (twenty-nine instead of thirty- 

 three or thirty-four, and seventy-one instead of 

 sixty-seven or sixty-six). 



The fourth characteristic of the pea with which 

 Mendel dealt was, as I have already said, the colour 

 of the unripe pod. This is, of course, usually green, 

 and, in ordinary kinds, the green only disappears 

 as the pod becomes dry and ripe. But there is 

 a variety of the culinary pea in which the pod goes 



