224 HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 



C. EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF INHERI- 

 TANCE 



I. Mendelism 

 The year 1900 marks the beginning of a 

 new era in the study of inheritance. In the 

 spring of that year three botanists, deVries, 

 Correns, and Tschermak, discovered inde- 

 pendently an important principle of heredity 

 and at the same time brought to light a long 

 neglected and forgotten work on "Experi- 

 ments in Plant Hybridization" by Gregor 

 Mendel, in which this same principle was set 

 forth in detail. This principle is now gener- 

 ally knoAvn as "Mendel's Law." Mendel, who 

 was a monk, and later abbot, of the Konigs- 

 Moster, an Augustinian monastery in Brxinn, 

 Austria, published the results of his experi- 

 ments on hybridization in the Proceedings of 

 the Natural History Society of Brtinn in 

 1866. The paper attracted but little attention 

 at the time although it contained some of the 

 most important discoveries regarding inheri- 

 tance which had ever been made, and it re- 



