LUTHER BURBANK 
be segregated and recombined in the second gen- 
eration hybrids that had come so often under my 
observation that it had become a commonplace to 
me many years before the publication of this 
catalog in 1898. 
I have elsewhere stated that the matter had 
been the subject of controversy with a good many 
of the leading botanists and horticulturists of the 
world, and that during the period of perhaps fif- 
teen years prior to the rediscovery of Mendel’s 
experiments, I seemingly stood in a minority of 
one in the belief that such segregation and redis- 
tribution of characters in the second generation 
hybrids is the usual and all but habitual method 
of inheritance. 
After DeVries and his fellow-workers had 
come upon Mendel’s earlier publication and made 
it known to the world, the matter was no longer 
in dispute. 
But then the neophytes who had so long refused 
to listen to my claim were disposed, after the man- 
ner of neophytes, to become over-enthusiasts, and 
some of them at least thought that the principle 
of the segregation of heritable characters in the 
second generation was one that must supplant all 
other principles of heredity, reducing questions of 
inheritance to such simple formula that the veri- 
est tyro could master them, and having them in 
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