MENDELISM 227 



Silesia and, in 1843, entered the Augustine seminary of 

 Altbrunn, subsequently proceeding to the University 

 of Vienna, where he studied science. In 1853 he re- 

 turned to Briinn as a teacher and finally as Abbot of the 

 Monastery, where he remained till his death in 1884. 



During the long quiet years of his residence at Briinn 

 he seems to have taken a keen interest in the local 

 scientific society and published several papers in its 

 Journal, and also carried out a lengthy series of experi- 

 ments in the Monastery garden on the hybridisation of 

 peas and hawkweeds, an account of which he published 

 in 1865 in the Journal of the Briinn Society. Whether 

 it was because naturalists did not attach any particular 

 importance to the Abbot's work, or because the paper 

 itself was hidden in an out-of-the-way publication, the 

 fact remains that these, now classic, experiments and the 

 epoch-making conclusions drawn from them lay unknown 

 for thirty-five years until, in 1900, the paper was discovered 

 by De Vries, Correns, and Tschermak, and, as expounded 

 by these well-known authorities, immediately attracted 

 the attention of the whole biological world. Let us see 

 what Mendel actually found and what conclusions he 

 drew from his observations. 



For the purposes of his experiments he selected the 

 common garden pea which, in cultivation, exhibits quite 

 a number of distinct breeds or strains. Some are tall, 

 some are dwarf, some red flowered, some white flowered, 

 some have smooth testas and some have wrinkled testas, 

 and so on, and each of these strains, if self -fertilised, 

 " breed true." Mendel then selected two strains that 

 showed a marked contrast in any one of these characters, 

 such as colour, height, surface of testa, etc., and watched 

 the effect of cross-fertilisation of contrasted strains and 

 afterwards of self -fertilisation of the resulting hybrids. 

 In one case he selected height, and artificially crossed a 

 tall strain with a dwarf one, and obtained the unexpected 

 result that all the progeny were tall, no dwarfs and no 



