Page:Mendel's principles of heredity; a defence.pdf/57

 where it is simply stated that Mendel's numerous experiments on Pisum gave results similar to those obtained by Knight, but that he believed he had found constant numerical ratios among the types produced by hybridisation. In the same work a similar brief reference is made to the paper on Hieracium.

It may seem surprising that a work of such importance should so long have failed to find recognition and to become current in the world of science. It is true that the journal in which it appeared is scarce, but this circumstance has seldom long delayed general recognition. The cause is unquestionably to be found in that neglect of the experimental study of the problem of Species which supervened on the general acceptance of the Darwinian doctrines. The problem of Species, as Kölreuter, Gärtner,, Wichura, and the other hybridists of the middle of the nineteenth century conceived it, attracted thenceforth no workers. The question, it was imagined, had been answered and the debate ended. No one felt much interest in the matter. A host of other lines of work were suddenly opened up, and in 1865 the more original investigators naturally found those new methods of research more attractive than the tedious observations of the hybridisers, whose inquiries were supposed, moreover, to have led to no definite result.

Nevertheless the total neglect of such a discovery is not easy to account for. Those who are acquainted with the literature of this branch of inquiry will know that the French Academy offered a prize in 1861 to be awarded in 1862 on the subject "Etudier les Hybrides végétaux au point de vue de leur fécondité et de la perpétuité de leurs caractères." This subject was doubtless chosen with reference to the experiments of Godron of Nancy and Naudin, then of Paris. Both these naturalists competed,