MENDEL'S DISCOVERY 195 



though at the time it fell on deaf ears, was at once 

 recognised as of immense value when it was again 

 brought forth and exhibited before a generation of 

 biologists which had been prepared by Weismann. 

 Why did Goss fail to do this ? The answer is mani- 

 fold. In the first place, he was not seeking for an 

 interpretation of his results. And, in the case of 

 interpretations, he who does not seek will not find ; 

 he may not find what he is seeking ; but if he does 

 not seek at all he will find nothing at all. Another 

 reason why Goss failed to make Mendel's discovery 

 is that he did not record the proportion in which his 

 types recurred in the second hybrid generation. But 

 this is scarcely remarkable in view of the fact that 

 not only did he not know that it was a second hybrid 

 generation : he did not know that it was a genera- 

 tion. He says (last paragraph, p. 200) : " Should 

 this new variety of pea neither possess superior merit 

 nor be deemed singular in its bicoloured produce 

 ..." From this it is evident that he perfectly 

 naturally regarded the coloured parts of the seeds 

 borne by a pea plant as its fruit, and did not know, 

 what he could not be expected to know, that they 

 were the cotyledons of the next generation. The 

 recording of the numbers was an essential preliminary 

 to the suggestion of the theory put forward by Men- 

 del ; and in my opinion the great future advances in 

 this line of work will be made by paying close atten- 

 tion to numerical ratios, and testing them with statis- 

 tical formulae. Another reason why Goss failed where 

 Mendel succeeded is that he did not record the ofi- 



