MENDEL'S DISCOVERY 193 



I will proceed now to a short description of a 

 hybridisation experiment identical with one of Men- 

 del's which was begun in 1820, two years before Men- 

 del's birth. The work was done by John Goss in the 

 garden shown in Fig. 34, in the village of Hather- 

 leigh, in Devonshire, which is eight miles from the 

 northern border of Dartmoor. The results of the 

 experiment were published in the " Horticultural 

 Transactions " in 1822, in a paper which is repro- 

 duced on pp. 199-202. 



As will be seen from his third paragraph, he pro- 

 ceeded as directed in Chapter X., except that he 

 applied the pollen (of the dwarf pea) on the following 

 day. He obtained three pods of hybrid seed. In the 

 sentence beginning " In the following spring . . . "* 

 the phenomenon of dominance is described, and in 

 the next sentence the phenomenon of segregation. 

 But Goss went farther than this. Not only did he 

 witness the phenomenon of dominance and of segrega- 

 tion ; he also observed the true-breeding of re- 

 cessives. " Last spring I separated aU the blue peas 

 from the white, and sowed each colour in separate 

 rows, and I now find that the blue "produce only 

 blue. . . ."t 



But, as the words which follow show, Goss failed 

 to discover that some of the plants bore only yellow 

 seeds, and some both yellow and green. The reason 

 for this, I have little doubt, is that Goss did not 



* Bottom of p. 199. 



t In the colours of peas "blue" is synonymous with green, and 

 "white" with yellow. 



N 



