Origins of Mendelism / Robert C. Olby, with an introduction by Professor C. D. Darlington.

  • Olby, Robert C. (Robert Cecil), 1933-
Date:
1966
Catalogue details

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

Credit: Origins of Mendelism / Robert C. Olby, with an introduction by Professor C. D. Darlington. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    22 Origins of Mende lis m By repeated experiments [in transmutation], he has no less successfully reduced these varieties to their original form and genus. He has again conducted them through their different gradations, and again and again fully restored them to all their original powers, and proper¬ ties : bringing back some of them to the male kind, and others to the female. Tiresius was struck blind, when he daringly en¬ deavoured to unfold the secrets of Venus. May we not expect that another Nemesis shall pursue the man who, with wonderful wisdom and passionate ardour, has drawn aside the veil of nature? This bold and discreet observer, who watched the bees at their employment, and who, by placing glass tubes in the ambrosial cups of flowers (nectaries), robbed them of their sweets and brought forth honey, this remarkable man has not a foot of land that he can call his own. Not one of the great men of Germany has conferred on himself the honour, or the delight, of bestowing a garden on this sage: whose science is as pleasant as it is abundantly beneficial.® But Count von Stolberg's plea fell on unreceptive ground, for the eighteenth century was the age of Lin- nean botany, the age of great voyages and mammoth collections. Every biologist of international standing had been on an expedition and had collected something. The stay-at-home experimentalist was just not in the picture. His work was regarded as curious and ingenious but rarely as important. Thus Linnaeus, in his celebrated Philosophia botanica described the work of the plant anato¬ mists Malpighi, Grew and Hales as not properly belong¬ ing to botany as a science.'^ In the nineteenth century, however, the subjects which these men tackled came to assume an important place in botany. The same was true for Koelreuter's work. Apart from a repetition of one of