Seven ambitious brothers and how they bred a race of kings / editor: Henry Smith Williams, M.D., LL.D.

Date:
[1914]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Seven ambitious brothers and how they bred a race of kings / editor: Henry Smith Williams, M.D., LL.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    MENDELIAN HEREDITY The discovery that second generation hybrids tend thus to recombine the characteristics of their grandparents in new combinations has been made even earlier by an experimenter whose work for the time being was ignored, but who subsequently came to posthumous fame through the rediscovery of his work about the beginning of the present century. This was the Austrian-Silesian monk, Mendel. He had not only made independently the discovery that had meant so much in Mr. Bur- bank’s work, but he had followed it out with num- erical computations that gave him a very definite notion as to the exact way in which the divergent traits of any given pair of parents would be com- bined in their descendants. Mendel’s work was chiefly done with the garden pea, and he dealt with qualities that are mutually exclusive—large size versus small size, for example, in the case of the pea, or yellow pods versus green pods, or pink flowers versus white flowers. To state the simplest case, Mendel found that when a tall race of peas is crossed with a short race, the progeny are all tall; but the quality of shortness, although for the moment suppressed, is not lost, but reappears in about one in four of the progeny of the next generation: [20]
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