Experiments in plant hybridisation / Mendel's original paper in English translation, with commentary and assessment by Sir Ronald A. Fisher, together with a reprint of W. Bateson's biographical notice of Mendel ; edited by J.H. Bennett.

  • Mendel, Gregor, 1822-1884.
Date:
[1965]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Experiments in plant hybridisation / Mendel's original paper in English translation, with commentary and assessment by Sir Ronald A. Fisher, together with a reprint of W. Bateson's biographical notice of Mendel ; edited by J.H. Bennett. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    15/116 (page 1)
    1 INTRODUCTORY NOTES ON MENDEL'S PAPER Ronald A. Fisher Mendel's celebrated paper on inheritance in the garden pea was read at two successive meetings, 8th February and 8th March 1865, of the Brünn [now Brno] Natural History Society, and was published in the following year in the Proceedings of that Society for 1865. Although Mendel's material was thus laid rather fully before a not undistinguished provincial society, and although the publication was doubtless made available to the leading Academies of Europe (Bateson verified that copies were received in London by the Royal and by the Linnaean Society), it must be supposed that it did not come under the eyes of any scientist capable of appreciating its importance, for it attracted little contemporary notice, and required to be rediscovered with some sensational circumstances in 1900, when three European botanists, de Vries in Holland, Correns in Germany, and Tschermak in Austria, had all discovered its existence. It had at this time the triple aspect of a confirmation, an anti¬ cipation, and an interpretation of their own researches. Almost instantly, or at least so quickly that it is difficult to discern the order of events, it was recognised that Mendel's discovery was applicable not only to plants, but also to inheritance in animals, including Man, for human pedigrees existed eminently susceptible to a Mendelian explanation. In 1900, therefore, it was natural that scientific attention should be concentrated on a discovery of blazing importance. This was the interpretation of the phenomena of heredity, bafilingly complex as these had appeared to be, in terms of the transmission unchanged from generation to generation of rela¬ tively permanent units, for which Johannsen later suggested the convenient name of genes. It is true that much work was still needed to show how widely this simple concept would be