NEW CREATIONS IN PLANT LIFE 
had before. Willing at all points to yield the 
moment he was convinced of error, it was 
yet inevitable that his own sound judgment 
should tell him that when his vast experi- 
ments developed results diametrically opposed 
to the results of the scientists working in 
circumscribed quarters, he was bound to 
stand by his own. Twelve plants in a given 
test might do certain things in concert and 
thus apparently establish a law, but a hundred 
thousand plants, indeed, sometimes a million 
plants, in the same test by developing ab- 
solutely contrary conclusions, utterly set 
at naught the significance of the twelve. 
This may very clearly be seen in the results 
of his observations along the lines of the 
so-called Mendelian Laws. 
Mendel, a parish priest in Briin, Austria, 
a devoted student of botany, prepared a 
paper in the year 1865 in which he showed, 
as a result of his years of investigation, that 
certain laws were bound to obtain in the 
breeding of plants. When two peas, for 
example, were crossed, two prevailing sets 
of characters or characteristics were developed. 
One of these he called “dominant,” certain 
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