Mendel knew nothing about mutations and chromosomes. In his cloister gardens in Brünn (Brno) he made experiments on the garden pea, of which he reared different varieties, crossing them and watching their offspring in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, …, generation. You might say, he experimented with mutants which he found ready-made in nature. The results he published as early as 1866 in the Proceedings of the Naturforschender Verein in Brünn. Nobody seems to have been particularly interested in the abbot’s hobby, and nobody, certainly, had the faintest idea that his discovery would in the twentieth
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