334 Biographical Notice 



In 1865. the year of Mendel's communication to the 

 Briinn Society, appeared Wichura s famous treatise on his 

 experiments with Salix to which Mendel refers. There are 

 passages in this memoir which come very near Mendel's 

 principles, but it is evident from the plan of his experiments 

 that Mendel had conceived the whole of his ideas before 

 that date. 



In 1868 appeared the first edition of Darwin's Animals 

 and Plants, marking the very zenith of these studies, and 

 thenceforth the decline in the experimental investigation 

 of Evolution and the problem of Species has been steady. 

 With the rediscovery and confirmation of Mendel's w^ork 

 by de Vries, Correns and Tschermak in 1900 a new era 

 beoins. 



o 



That Mendel's work, appearing as it did at a moment 

 when several naturalists of the first rank were still occupied 

 with these problems, should have passed wholly unnoticed, 

 will always remain inexplicable, the more so as the Briinn 

 Society exchanged its publications with most of the Acade- 

 mies of Europe, including both the Royal and Linnean 

 Societies. 



Naudin's views were well known to Darwin and are 

 discussed in Aniinals and Plants (ed. 1885, 11. p. 23); but, 

 put forward as they were without full proof, they could not 

 command universal credence. Darwin took the objection 

 that Naudin's ideas were not compatible with cases of 

 reversion, though as we now know, such cases are perfectly 

 consistent with the phenomenon of segregation. Gartner, 

 too, had adopted opposite views ; and Wichura, working 

 with cases of another order, had proved the fact that some 

 hybrids breed true. Consequently it is not to be wondered 

 at that Darwin was sceptical. Moreover, the Mendelian 

 idea of the " hybrid-character," or heterozygous form, was 

 unknown to him, a conception without which the hypothesis 

 of dissociation of characters is quite imperfect. 



Had Mendel's work come into the hands of Darwin, it 

 is not too much to say that the history of the development 

 of evolutionary philosophy would have been very different 

 from that which we have witnessed. 



