Mendel, though aware of the brilliance of his predecessor, was bold enough in designing his own experiments to recognize the flaws in Gärtner’s. He showed the sensibility of a modern scientist, whose métier is replication of prior results, when he wrote: “It is very regrettable that this worthy man did not publish a detailed description of his individual experiments, and that he did not diagnose his hybrid types sufficiently.” This imprecision meant that he could not reproduce Gärtner’s results even “in a single case!” In addition, Gärtner seemed to have had no idea whether the plants he used
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