238 



The Journal of Heredity 



lection, opposed to my own general ob- 

 servations, it is unnecessary to state 

 more concerning his mules, than the 

 fact that he was the father of such ex- 

 periments. They do not seem to have 

 been at all followed up by others, or to 

 have attracted the attention of culti- 

 vators or botanists as they ought to 

 have done; and nothing else material 

 on the subject has fallen under my no- 

 tice of earlier date than Mr. Knight's 

 report of his crosses of fruit trees, and 

 my own of ornamental flowers, in the 

 Transactions of the Horticultural So- 

 ciety of London. Those papers at- 

 tracted the public notice, and appear 

 to have excited many persons, both in 

 this country and abroad, to similar 

 experiments." 



Herbert's experimental work was 

 animated by the conviction of the fact 

 which he felt himself to have estab- 

 lished, that the then current botanical 

 dogma was wrong, which regarded the 

 existence of sterile offspring from a 

 cross, as evidence that the two parents 

 were of different "species." His views 

 were contrary to those held at the time 

 by Knight, in common with many 

 botanists, "that the production of a 

 fertile cross was proof that the two 

 parents were of the same species," 

 assuming, as a consequence, "that the 

 sterile offspring was nearly conclusive 

 evidence that they were of different 

 species; and this dictum was advanced 

 without suggesting any alteration in 

 the definition of the term 'species,' but 

 leaving it to imply what it has before 

 universally signified in the language of 

 botanists." 



A PRECURSOR OF MENDEL 



Besides the work of Knight and Her- 

 bert, an experiment from the first half 

 of the nineteenth century, which has 

 elicited considerable interest, because 

 of its suggestion of the later discov- 

 eries of Mendel, is that of John Goss, of 

 Hatherleigh, in Devonshire, England, 

 with garden peas. In the summer of 

 1820, Goss pollinated flowers of the Blue 

 Prussian variety with pollen of a dwarf 

 pea known as Dwarf Spanish, obtain- 

 ing, as the result of the cross, three 



pods of hybrid seeds. In the spring of 

 1821, when he opened these pods for 

 planting, he was surprised to find that 

 the color of the seeds [i. e., of the 

 cotyledons) , instead of being a deep blue 

 like those of the female parent, was yel- 

 lowish-white like that of the male. 

 Here was evidently a case of complete 

 dominance of yellow-white over blue 

 cotyledons. However, the plants grow- 

 ing from these seeds in that season 

 "produced some pods with all blue, 

 some with all white, and many wdth 

 both blue and white peas in the same 

 pod." Here was evidently a plain dis- 

 covery of the fact of segregation, ac- 

 cording to what later became known as 

 Mendel's law. The following spring 

 (1822) he separated the blue peas from 

 the white, sowing the seeds of each 

 color in separate rows. He found that 

 the blue seeds, which we should now call 

 the "recessives," produced in turn only 

 blue seeds; while the white seeds, or 

 "dominants" as they are now called, 

 "yielded some pods with all white, and 

 some with both blue and white peas in- 

 termixed." Here, then, is the typical 

 case of the segregation of the heterozy- 

 gotes or hybrid dominants. 



Although Goss in this experiment un- 

 doubtedly made evident the facts of 

 dominance and of segregation, he did 

 not recognize them as such, nor did he, 

 apparently, sow the seeds of his differ- 

 ent plants separately, or make counts of 

 the number of seeds of the two colors 

 found on each separate plant, as did 

 Mendel in his experiments. Goss was 

 chiefly interested in the question of the 

 possibility of the ' ' new variety ' ' having 

 superior value as an edible pea, and yet 

 remarked that, in case it possessed no 

 superior merit, that there yet might be 

 "something in its history that will 

 emit a ray of physiological light." 

 However, the " physiological light " did 

 not appear until after the rediscovery 

 of Mendel's papers in 1900. The paper 

 of John Goss was read before the Horti- 

 cultural Society, October 15, 1822. At 

 the meeting of the 20th of August 

 preceding, a communication was read 

 on the same subject from Alexander 

 Seton. Seton had pollinated the flowers 



