238 AGRICULTURE 



During the last ten years much of the work 

 of plant breeding has followed what are 

 called Mendelian lines. The name is derived 

 from an Austrian monk who, about the 

 middle of last century, occupied his leisure 

 with plant breeding, and although his results 

 appeared in a local publication, it is only of 

 late years that they have attracted much 

 attention. Hitherto plant and animal im- 

 provement by crossing has been slow to 

 furnish stable strains, for the reason that 

 one has never been sure how to select from 

 the progeny those individuals that were of a 

 fixed type, and would therefore breed true. 

 Mendel, however, showed that the characters 

 of the parents are transmitted to the offspring 

 according to a definite law, now known as 

 Mendel's law, by the observance of which 

 very striking results have been secured in 

 a remarkably short space of time. The law, 

 no doubt, appears to break down at many 

 points, but this is probably due in most, if 

 not in all, cases to the fact that the parents 

 are not " pure-bred," in the strict sense of 

 the term. Mendel's experiments were carried 

 out with peas, some plants of which he found 

 to possess the character of tallness as con- 

 trasted with dwarfness, greenness in the seed 

 as compared with yellowness, wrinkled seed 



