MENDELISM 121 



inheritance of the characters or attributes of living 

 things. Old fashioned men of science may join in 

 chorus with old fashioned men of practice and doubt 

 never so vocally ; but it is so ; and the best proof of 

 the value of the method lies in the fact that those 

 who know and use it can often show the practical 

 plant breeder the proper way to set to work to 

 secure results which hitherto have baffled his 

 powers. It is essential to our purpose to describe 

 several of the main conclusions reached by Mendel 

 and confirmed by his successors. The first of these 

 is that as the individual derives from two parents 

 and is in that sense a dual thing so is it dual with 

 respect to each of its characters. It may derive 

 the means of developing any one character from 

 both its parents. If so it is pure bred and mating 

 with its like will have issue all of which exhibit 

 the character in question. Or if it descend from 

 parents one of which possessed the character and 

 the other did not, the individual, like a double- 

 barrelled gun, one barrel of which only is loaded, 

 may have only one charge for the expression of 

 the character. Though the one charge may suffice 

 to bring out the character in the individual it 

 will not suffice to establish that character in all 

 his descendants. Mated with his like, that is with 

 another individual in like case with respect to 

 the character, he will produce offspring a fixed 

 proportion of which have the character in question 

 and a fixed proportion of which lack the character. 



