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.

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    44 EXPERIMENTS IN PLANT HYBRIDISATION Pisum is unmistakable. It is otherwise with the exceptional cases cited. Gärtner confesses even that the exact determination whether a form bears a greater resemblance to one or to the other of the two original species often involved great difficulty, so much depending upon the subjective point of view of the observer. Another circumstance could, however, contribute to render the results fluctuating and uncertain, despite the most careful observation and differentiation. For the experiments, plants were mostly used which rank as good species and are differentiated by a large number of characters. In addition to the sharply defined characters, where it is a question of greater or less similarity, those characters must also be taken into account which are often difficult to define in words, but yet suffice, as every plant specialist knows, to give the forms a peculiar appearance. If it be accepted that the development of hybrids follows the law which is valid for Pisum, the series in each separate experiment must contain very many forms, since the number of the terms, as is known, increases with the number of the differentiating characters as the powers of three. With a relatively small number of experimental plants the result there¬ fore could only be approximately right, and in single cases might fluctuate considerably. If, for instance, the two original stocks differ in seven characters, and 100-200 plants were raised from the seeds of their hybrids to determine the grade of relation¬ ship of the offspring, we can easily see how uncertain the decision must become since for seven differentiating characters the combination [developmental] series contains 16,384 individuals under 2187 various forms; now one and then another relation¬ ship could assert its predominance, just according as chance presented this or that form to the observer in a majority of cases. If, furthermore, there appear among the differentiating characters at the same time dominant characters, which are transmitted entire or nearly unchanged to the hybrids, then in the terms of the developmental series that one of the two original parents which possesses the majority of dominant characters must always be predominant. In the experiment described relative to Pisum, in which three kinds of differen¬ tiating characters were concerned, all the dominant characters belonged to the seed parent. Although the terms of the series