MENDEL'S WORK ON HYBRIDIZATION 195 



successful issue when working with closely related species or 

 varieties. The flower of one kind of orchid, for example, may 

 perhaps be fertilized by the pollen of a different orchid, but the 

 pollen of such a plant as a lily would probably not have the 

 slightest effect upon it. 



The first observer to throw a clear light upon the meaning of 

 the remarkable results obtained by hybridization was Gregor 

 Johann Mendel, a native of Austrian Silesia, born in 1822, whose 

 work has recently attracted so much attention. As Abbot of / 

 Briinn, he was the happy possessor of a garden, and presumably 

 also of that peace and quiet which are so essential to intellectual \ 

 work. He was not content with merely casual experiments ; he 

 had time to think about what he was doing and he attacked the 

 problem in the true scientific spirit. Unfortunately for science, 

 however, his seclusion was a little too complete. He was content 

 to publish his results in 1865 and 1869 in the proceedings of a local 

 natural history society, where they remained buried and almost 

 unnoticed for more than thirty years. Thus, by the irony of fate, 

 our own illustrious countryman, Charles Darwin, although a con- 

 temporary of Mendel, probably never heard of those remarkable 

 discoveries which bid fair to solve some of the problems in which 

 he himself was so deeply interested. 



In order to gain an insight into the nature of Mendel's work 

 we cannot do better than turn to his original memoir, entitled 

 " Experiments in Plant Hybridization," of which an excellent 

 translation has been published by Professor Bateson, 1 one of the 

 leading exponents of what is now termed Mendelism. Even fifty 

 years ago, experiments in hybridization were, as we have already 

 seen, no new thing. Mendel had many predecessors in this line 

 of research, but it was reserved for him to introduce exact 

 statistical methods into the work, and it is to these methods that 

 he owed his success. It was already known that hybridization, 

 or the crossing of distinct species and varieties, might result 

 in the production of several distinct types of offspring from 

 the same hybrids. Mendel was not content with this know- 

 ledge : he proceeded by numerous and often repeated experi- 

 ments, extending over several years, to classify the offspring 

 produced by hybridization, to follow out their descendants from 

 generation to generation, and above all to find out the exact 

 numerical proportions in which the different types appeared in 



1 Vide Bateson, " Mendel's Principles of Heredity " (Cambridge, 1909). 



o 2 



