Page:Mendel's principles of heredity; a defence.pdf/59

 when several naturalists of the first rank were still occupied with these problems, should have passed wholly unnoticed, will always remain inexplicable, the more so as the Brünn Society exchanged its publications with most of the Academies of Europe, including both the Royal and Linnean Societies.

Naudin's views were well known to Darwin and are discussed in Animals and Plants (ed. 1885, ., p. 23); but, put forward as they were without full proof, they could not command universal credence. Gärtner, too, had adopted opposite views; and Wichura, working with cases of another order, had proved the fact that some hybrids breed true. Consequently it is not to be wondered at that Darwin was sceptical. Moreover, the Mendelian idea of the "hybrid-character," or heterozygous form, was unknown to him, a conception without which the hypothesis of dis- sociation of characters is quite imperfect.

Had Mendel's work come into the hands of Darwin, it is not too much to say that the history of the development of evolutionary philosophy would have been very different from that which we have witnessed.