vii LAW AND PRINCIPLE 193 



into the hands of Darwin, it is not too much to say that 

 the history of the development of evolutionary philo- 

 sophy would have been very different from that which 

 we have witnessed." 



For eight years Mendel carried on experiments on 

 the hybridisation of peas and other plants in the large 

 garden of the cloister of which he was Abbot or Pralat. 

 He described his experiments in the Proceedings of the. 

 Natural History Society of Brunn, in 1866 and 1869, 

 and they remained unknown outside the circle of that 

 local society until the year 1900, when attention was 

 directed to them. He was in the habit of saying Meine 

 Zeit wird schon kommen my time will no doubt come 

 and his confidence has been fully justified. Since the 

 re-discovery of his two papers, the principles they teach 

 have been applied to hundreds of different plants and 

 animals, and Mendel's law has guided most studies of 

 heredity, while Mendelism has become a clearly-defined 

 branch of science. The white marble statue erected 

 to his memory in Briinn, in 1910, represents the esteem 

 in which scientific men of all nations now hold the 

 Abbot of the Konigskloster in that city. 



It would be out of place here to describe in detail the 

 nature and consequences of Mendel's great biological 

 discovery, but we may sketch its main principle. Work- 

 ing with garden peas, Mendel found that different 

 characters, such as wrinkled or smooth seed, colour of 

 the seed-coats, form of the pods, length of the stem, and 

 so on, could be used to distinguish them. He observed 

 that when two plants differing by a given feature were 

 crossed, the hybrid offspring invariably exhibited one 

 of the parental characters to the entire or partial ex- 

 clusion of the other. Thus when tall varieties of peas 

 were crossed with dwarf varieties, the offspring were all 



G.D. N 



