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LUTHER BURBANK
recorded in the catalog of 1893 could not be at
once interpreted in what are now spoken of as
Mendelian terms, because at that time no one
knew anything of Mendelism as such. The experi-
ments of Mendel had indeed been made just thirty
years before, and Mendel himself, as it chanced,
had died in the very year-namely 1884-in which
my first importation of plants from the Orient, to
furnish material for experiments, was made. But,
as the reader is aware, the publication of Mendel
was altogether ignored, and nothing was heard of
his experiments until his paper was rediscovered
by Professor de Vries and by two others about the
year 1900.
But it is elsewhere pointed out that whereas
the Mendelian formula was not then in vogue, yet
the essentials of the aspect of heredity that Mendel
espoused were abundantly illustrated in the
hybridizing experiments, the results of which were
published in New Creations (1893) and its suc-
cessive supplements.
It is scarcely necessary to remind the reader
that the essentials of the aspect of heredity in
question had to do, as stated by Mendel, not so
much with the great mass of heritable characters,
as with some of the minor points of difference that
mark varieties within a species. Mendel himself
did not hybridize different species, or, if he did,
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