A. D. Darbishire. 
i 70 
LECTURE II. 
a 
The Attempt to tackle the Problem of Inheritance by 
STUDYING THE PHENOMENA OF CrOSS-BrEEDING. 
The Mendelian Phenomenon. 
N the summer of 1820, the year in which Mendel was born, 
John Goss, living at Hatherleigh, a village some eight miles due 
north of the northern boundary of Dartmoor, crossed a yellow- 
cotyledoned 1 variety of the culinary Pea with a green-cotyledoned 
variety of it, and found that the hybrid thus obtained was yellow- 
cotyledoned, or, as we may call it for short, “ yellow.” He found 
that these yellow hybrids gave rise in the next generation to both 
yellows and greens ; and further that, whilst all these yellows, as he 
thought, gave rise to yellows and greens again, the greens all bred 
perfectly true. Those who are familiar with the Mendelian pheno¬ 
menon will recognize that Goss witnessed the phenomena of 
Dominance and Segregation and also the fact of extracted recessives 
(the greens) in F 2 breeding true. 
I will allow Goss to describe his results in his own words 2 : 
“.I have raised some new varieties of peas, and as one of 
these appears to be at least a singular production, and finding very 
little on this subject in your volumes, I am tempted to give you a 
description of it accompanied with a few observations. 
In the summer of 1820, I deprived some blossoms of the 
Prolific Blue of their stamina, and the next day applied the pollen 
of a Dxvarf Pea, and of which impregnation I obtained three pods 
of seeds. In the following spring when these were opened in order to 
1 By a yellow-cotyledoned Pea I mean a Pea-plant whose first 
two leaves or cotyledons are yellow. Similarly with a green- 
cotyledoned Pea. I shall revert to this question later. 
E Horticultural Transactions, Vol. V., p. 234. 
