^2 HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY OF NEW YORK. 



to suspend our judgment and wait for further facts. But while we wait, let 

 us also work, and help to secure those further facts, of which we are so much 

 in need, altogether regardless of whether they happen to confirm or not the 

 principles laid down by Mendel. 



In order to accomplish this it will be necessary to work strictly on Men- 

 delian lines, and to study Mendel's methods with great care. 



Mendel, after surveying the work of his predecessors, started with a clear 

 conception of what he wanted to investigate, and arranged his experiments 

 accordingly. 



In his own language, he wished : 



(1) To determine the number of different forms under which the off- 

 spring of hybrids appear. 



(2) To arrange these forms with certainty according to their separate 

 generations. 



(3) To definitely ascertain their numerical or statistical relations. 



The careful judgment, skill and forethought which Mendel displayed in 

 organizing and carrying out his experiments with Pisum were evidently the 

 products of a master mind, and for some time to come his classical experiments 

 will serve as a model for the hybridist who wishes to attack the perplexing 

 problems of inheritance. 



The general object of this paper is to give a brief outline of Mendel's 

 methods, and to endeavor to show how superior they are in all respects to the 

 methods of his predecessors. The particular object of this paper is to express 

 the hope that the hybridists and breeders of the New World, with their 

 progressive ideas, their many opportunities, their vast system of experiment 

 stations, and their practical knowledge of breeding, will take up and test the 

 matter on a much larger scale than we can hope to do in the Old World, and 

 thus help to bring the question to a speedy and definite issue. 



So convinced is the writer of the superiority of Mendel's methods that he 

 has already in hand a large number of experiments on Mendelian lines, in 

 Pisum, Lathyrus, Papaver, Primula, and Paphiopedilum (Cypripedium), and 

 also in various breeds of Fancy Poultry, the results of which he hopes to 

 publish in due course. 



MENDEL'S METHODS, 

 (i) Single Characters. 



One of the most fruitful sources of confusion, in the older records of ex- 

 periments in cross-breeding, has been the selection of the individual plant as 

 the unit upon which to base the results. 



The individual plant is made up of a large number of characters — organs, 

 structures, whatever one may term them — distinctly marked off from* 

 one another, the points of difference both in form and in color being sometimes 

 great and at other times small. In working out the inheritance of specific char- 

 acter in hybrid orchids in 1899, the writer became much impressed with the 

 possibilities of variation in individuals, when a number of characters in each 

 were considered together as one unit. (Ref. 3.) 



(3) Report of the International Conference on Hybridization, London, 1899, in Journ. 

 I'.oy. Hort. Soc, 1900, xxiv., pp. 106 — 117 



