THE ORCHID REVIEW. 



EXPERIMENTS IN PLANT HYBRIDISATION. 



In the year 1865, a paper on the above subject, by the late Gregor Mendel, 

 ■appeared in the A : /: • rschmden Vereines in Briinn (vol. 



iv.), which has been almost lost sight of, but a translation by Mr. William 

 Bateson, m.a., f.r.s., is given in the last number of the Journal of the Royal 

 Horticultural Society (xxv.. pp. 1-32), which should serve to rescue it from 

 that oblivion into which it had fallen. Although the paper does not deal in 

 any way with Orchids, the general principles involved are as applicable to 

 them as to any other plants, and as we know by correspondence that the 

 subject is already engaging the attention of Orchidists, it seems desirable to 

 devote a little space to it. The numerous hybrid Orchids now in existence 

 should throw further light on the question. 



In an introductory note, Mr. Bateson remarks that " the conclusion 

 which stands out as the chief result of Mendel's admirable experiments is 

 •of course the proof that in respect of certain pairs of differentiating charac- 

 ters the germ cells of a hybrid, or cross-bred, are pure, being carriers and 

 transmitters of either the one character or the other, not both." This, so 

 far as we can gather by a perusal of the paper, embodies what is subse- 

 quently termed "Mendel's law," and the translator adds— "that he 

 succeeded in demonstrating this law for the simple cases with which he 

 worked it is scarcely possible to doubt." He further remarks :— " In as far 

 as Mendel's law applies, therefore, the conclusion is forced upon us that a 

 living organism is a complex of characters, of which some, at least, are 

 capable of being replaced by others. We thus reach the conception of 

 unit-characters, which may be re-arranged in the formation of the repro- 

 ductive cells. It is hardly too much to say that the experiments which led 

 to this advance in knowledge are worthy to rank with those that laid the 

 foundation of the Atomic laws of Chemistry. 



" To what extent Mendel's conclusions will be found to apply to other 

 characters, and to other plants and animals, further experiment alone can 

 show. Though little has yet been done, we already know a considerable 

 group of cases in which the law holds, but we also have tolerably clear evi- 

 dence that many phenomena of cross-breeding point to the co-existence of 

 other laws of a much higher order of complexity. When the paper before 

 us was written Mendel apparently inclined to the view that, with modifica- 

 tions, his law might be found to include all the phenomena of hybridisation, 

 but in a brief subsequent paper on hybrids of the genus Hieracium he clearly 

 recognized the existence of unconformable cases. 



"Nevertheless, however much it maybe found possible to limit or extend 

 the principle discovered by Mendel, there can be no doubt that we have in 

 this work, not only a model for future experiments of the same kind, but also 



