A MANUAL OF MENDELISM 



MENDEL'S EXPERIMENTS 



Gregor Mendel, who was abbot of Briinn in the middle 

 of the nineteenth century, was a botanist of unusual 

 accomplishments whose interests lay chiefly in hybridi- 

 zation. In this subject, many botanists had already 

 been at work, but their operations had been accom- 

 panied by a serious defect. Hybrids had been bred and 

 observed and some had even been bred from again ; 

 but, so far, no hybrids' descendants had been systemati- 

 cally counted and classified, and, in consequence, the 

 knowledge of their reproductive behaviour was neither 

 full nor exact. It was generally believed they did not 

 breed true but threw progeny of different kinds ; yet 

 this belief rested upon haphazard observation and, as a 

 useful predictive weapon, was of little or no value. So 

 far, nobody had arranged the progeny of any hybrid in 

 differing kinds and counted either the number of kinds 

 or the individuals in each ; and, realizing that, till 

 this were done, the law which governs the reproductive 

 behaviour of hybrids was unlikely to be discovered, 

 Mendel undertook to do what earlier investigators 

 had either overlooked or neglected. Accordingly, he 



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