Mendel's Law: a Crucial Experiment

Abstract

I SEE from the published account of a recent discussion at the Cambridge meeting of the British Association that the facts of Mendelian segregation are still disputed by the biometric school of evolutionists. I venture, therefore, to submit to your readers the result of an experiment carried out at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Peradeniya, which, in my opinion, proves conclusively that in a particular crossbred form a particular pair of characters did become segregated in equal numbers of germ cells, both male and female. The characters in question were:—the appearance and absence respectively of a yellow coloration in the endosperm of grains of Indian corn (Zea Mays). These characters are discontinuous in the strain examined. Among about 100,000 grains which passed under my notice, I saw only two which were partly yellow and partly white; these were counted as yellow, being presumably heterozygotes.