OUTSTANDING BIOLOGICAL ADVANCES 37 



on the coat of certain hounds, investigated by statis- 

 tical methods the inheritance of stature and of genius 

 in human families, etc. He was led by his observa- 

 tions to formulate a law of ancestral inheritance 

 which received its clearest expression in his book, 

 Natural Inheritance, published in 1889. 



He was so deeply interested in Eugenics the 

 investigation of the conditions that improve, or 

 impair, the races of animals that he is to be re- 

 membered as the founder of that branch of biological 

 knowledge. 



Mendel. The earliest experimental investiga- 

 tions of heredity were conducted with plants, and 

 the first epoch-making results were those of Gregor 

 Mendel (1822-1884) (Fig. 10), a monk and later 

 abbot, of an Augustinian monastery at Briinn, 

 Austria. In the garden of the monastery, for eight 

 years before publishing his results, he made experi- 

 ments on the inheritance of individual (or unit) 

 characters in twenty-two varieties of garden peas. 

 Selecting certain constant and obvious characters, as 

 color and form of seed, length of stem, etc., he pro- 

 ceeded to cross these pure races, thus producing 

 hybrids, and, thereafter, to observe the results of 

 self-fertilization among the hybrids. 



