194 BREEDING 



record his plants separately, plant by plant, after 

 tliey had been pulled up and dried ; but looked at 

 a pod here and there as they stood in the ground, or 

 shelled the whole lot from the dried bundles without 

 regard to the individuality of the plants from which 

 the seeds came. 



That Goss did not examine the plants separately 

 after they had been pulled up is evident from the 

 fact that he never speaks of plants, but only of pods ; 

 that when he does deal with things separately, as in 

 the case of the green and yellow seeds of the second 

 hybrid generation, he says so. This conclusion is 

 also supported by the fact that Goss was not seeking 

 for an interpretation of the phenomenon he was 

 dealing with, but was trying to raise a new vegetable. 

 " The edible qualities of this pea I have not tried, 

 having but few, ^^ 



How it came about that Goss, with the pheno- 

 mena ready to his hand, failed to make the discovery 

 which is now associated with Mendel's name is a 

 question which naturally presents itself. In the first 

 place, it is, of course, more true in Goss's case than it 

 it is in Mendel's that biological opinion was not ready 

 to receive a theory such as Mendel's, which lies on the 

 surface of properly recorded results of such an experi- 

 ment as Goss made. If Mendel failed to graft his 

 theory on to current biological theory, such an 

 attempt made by Goss would have been doomed to 

 failure from the outset. Nevertheless Mendel did 

 what Goss did not do ; he extracted something from 

 or projected something into his observations which 



