HEREDITY 



scientific society. There they remained un- 

 heeded for thirty-four years, until their author 

 liad long been dead. Meantime biological sci- 

 ence had made steady prqgress. It reached 

 the position Mendel had attained in advance 

 of his time, and Mendel's law was rediscov- 

 ered simultaneously in 1900 by De Vries in 

 Holland, by Correns in Germany, and by 

 Tschermark in Austria. It gratifies our sense 

 of poetic justice that to-day the rediscovered 

 law bears the name, not of any one or of all of 

 its brilliant rediscoverers, but of the all-but- 

 forgotten Mendel. 



The essential features of this law can best 

 be explained in connection with some illustra- 

 tions, which I choose for convenience from my 

 own experiments. If a black guinea-pig of 

 pure race (Fig. 14) be mated with a white one 

 (Fig. 15), the offspring will, as explained on 

 page 10, all be black; none will be white. 

 To use Mendel's terminology, the black char- 

 acter dominates in the cross, while white 

 recedes from view. The black character is, 

 therefore, called the dominant character; 

 white, the recessive character. 



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