SUMMARY OF THE WORK 341 



made just thirty years before, and Mendel him- 

 self, as it chanced, had died in the very year — 

 namely 1884 — in which my first importation of 

 plants from the Orient, to furnish material for 

 experiments, was made. But, as the reader is 

 aware, the publication of Mendel was altogether 

 ignored, and nothing was heard of his experi- 

 ments until his paper was rediscovered by Pro- 

 fessor de Vries and by two others about the 

 year 1900. 



But it is elsewhere pointed out that whereas 

 the Mendelian formula was not then recognized, 

 yet the essentials of the aspect of heredity that 

 Mendel espoused were abundantly illustrated in 

 the hybridizing experiments, the results of which 

 were published in "New Creations" (1893) and 

 its successive supplements. 



It is scarcely necessary to remind the reader 

 that the essentials of the aspect of heredity in 

 question had to do, as stated by Mendel, not so 

 much with the great mass of heritable charac- 

 ters, as with some of the minor points of differ- 

 ence that mark varieties within a species. Men- 

 del himself did not hybridize different species, 

 or, if he did, the records of such hybridizing have 

 been lost. His essential experiments had to do 

 with garden peas and with the manner of trans- 

 mission of the minor difference between varieties 



