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. Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden. English
Date:
[1965]
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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.

    29/116 (page 15)
    Mendel's paper 15 the determination and classification of the forms under which the offspring of the hybrids appear. Henceforth in this paper those characters which are transmitted entire, or almost unchanged in the hybridisation, and therefore in themselves constitute the characters of the hybrid, are termed the dominant^ and those which become latent in the process recessive. The expression recessive has been chosen because the characters thereby designated withdraw or entirely disappear in the hybrids, but nevertheless reappear unchanged in their progeny, as will be demonstrated later on. It was furthermore shown by the whole of the experiments that it is perfectly immaterial whether the dominant character belongs to the seed plant or to the pollen plant; the form of the hybrid remains identical in both cases. This interesting fact was also emphasised by Gärtner, with the remark that even the most practised expert is not in a position to determine in a hybrid which of the two parental species was the seed or the pollen plant.* Of the differentiating characters which were used in the experiments the following are dominant: 1. The round or roundish form of the seed with or without shallow depressions. 2. The yellow colouring of the seed albumen [cotyledons]. 3. The grey, grey-brown, or leather-brown colour of the seed-coat, in association with violet-red blossoms and reddish spots in the leaf axils. 4. The simply inflated form of the pod. 5. The green colouring of the unripe pod in association with the same colour in the stems, the leaf-veins and the calyx. 6. The distribution of the flowers along the stem. 7. The greater length of stem. With regard to this last character it must be stated that the longer of the two parental stems is usually exceeded by the hybrid, a fact which is possibly only attributable to the greater luxuriance which appears in all parts of plants when stems of very different length are crossed. Thus, for instance, in repeated * [Gärtner, p. 223.]