Page:Mendel's principles of heredity; a defence.pdf/126

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A Defence of Mendel's

essence of the discovery. Of Mendel's conception of the hybrid as a distinct entity with characters proper to itself, apart from inheritance—the most novel thing in the whole paper—Professor Weldon gives no word. Upon this is poured an undigested mass of miscellaneous "facts" and statements from which the reader is asked to conclude, first, that a proposition attributed to Mendel regarding dominance of one character is not of "general"[1] application, and finally that "all work based on Mendel's method" is "vitiated" by a "fundamental mistake," namely "the neglect of ancestry[2]."

To find a parallel for such treatment of a great theme in biology we must go back to those writings of the orthodox which followed the appearance of the "Origin of Species."

On 17th December 1900 I delivered a Report to the Evolution Committee of the Royal Society on the experiments in Heredity undertaken by Miss E. R. Saunders and myself. This report has been offered to the Society for publication and will I understand shortly appear. In it we have attempted to show the extraordinary significance of Mendel's principle, to point out what in his results is essential and what subordinate, the ways in which the principle can be extended to apply to a diversity of more complex phenomena—of which some are incautiously cited

  1. ↑ The words "general" and "universal" appear to be used by Professor Weldon as interchangeable. Cp. Weldon, p. 235 and elsewhere, with Abstract given below.
  2. ↑ These words occur p. 252: "The fundamental mistake which vitiates all work based upon Mendel's method is the neglect of ancestry, and the attempt to regard the whole effect upon offspring produced by a particular parent, as due to the existence in the parent of particular structural characters, &c." As a matter of fact the view indicated in these last words is especially repugnant to the Mendelian principle, as will be seen.
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