Page:Mendel's principles of heredity; a defence.pdf/58

 and the accounts of the work of Godron on Datura and of Naudin on a number of species were published in the years 1864 and 1865 respectively. Both, especially the latter, are works of high consequence in the history of the science of heredity. In the latter paper Naudin clearly enuntiated what we shall henceforth know as the Mendelian conception of the dissociation of characters of cross-breds in the formation of the germ-cells, though apparently he never developed this conception.

In the year 1864, George Bentham, then President of the Linnean Society, took these treatises as the subject of his address to the Anniversary meeting on the 24 May, Naudin's work being known to him from an abstract, the full paper having not yet appeared. Referring to the hypothesis of dissociation which he fully described, he said that it appeared to be new and well supported, but required much more confirmation before it could be held as proven. (J. Linn. Soc., Bot., ., Proc., p. .)

In 1865, the year of Mendel's communication to the Brünn Society, appeared Wichura's famous treatise on his experiments with Salix to which Mendel refers. There are passages in this memoir which come very near Mendel's principles, but it is evident from the plan of his experiments that Mendel had conceived the whole of his ideas before that date.

In 1868 appeared the first edition of Darwin's Animals and Plants, marking the very zenith of these studies, and thenceforth the decline in the experimental investigation of Evolution and the problem of Species has been steady. With the rediscovery and confirmation of Mendel's work by de Vries, Correns and Tschermak in 1900 a new era begins.

That Mendel's work, appearing as it did, at a moment