SEGREGATION AND DOMINANCE 123 



3. JOHANN GREGOR MENDEL 



Our understanding of the working of inheritance 

 in hybridization we owe largely to the unpretentious 

 studies of an Austrian monk, Johann Gregor Mendel, 

 who, although a contemporary of Darwin, was prob- 

 ably unknown to him. For eight years Mendel 

 carried on original experiments by breeding peas in 

 the privacy of his cloister garden at Briinn and then 

 sent the results of his work to a former teacher, 

 the celebrated Karl Nageli, of the University of 

 Vienna. At the time Nageli's head was full of other 

 matters, so that he failed to see the significance of 

 his old pupil's efforts. However, in 1866 Mendel's 

 results appeared in the Transactions of the Natural 

 History Society of Briinn, 1 an obscure publication 

 that reached hardly more than a local public. Here 

 Mendel's investigations were buried, so to speak, 

 because the time was not ripe for a general apprecia- 

 tion or evaluation of his work. 



At that time neither the chromosome theory nor 

 the germplasm theory had been formulated. More- 

 over, much of our present knowledge of cell structure 

 and behavior was not even in existence. Weismann 

 had not yet led out the biological children of Israel 

 through the wilderness upon that notable pilgrimage 

 of fruitful controversy which occupied the last two 

 decades of the nineteenth century, and the attention 

 of the entire thinking world was being monopolized 



1 Verhandlungen naturf . Verein in Briinn. Abhandl. IV, 1865 (which 

 appeared in 1866). 



