ABSTRACT
Mendel presented his lecture Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden (Experiments on Plant Hybridization), at two meetings of the Natural History Society of Brünn in 1865, which were locally well received. In 1866, Mendel wrote his report, which he sent to one of the leading botanists of the time, Karl Wilhem von Nägeli, in Switzerland, who showed no interest. He published his paper Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden in the society’s journal, Verhandlungen des naturforschenden Vereines in Brünn, in 1866 and sent 40 reprints of his work to various scholars in the world. By 1900, 16 years after Mendel died and 46 years after he started his work, which is the birth of genetics, Hugo de Vries of the Netherlands noticed three variations in primroses, and during the next 10 years, grew more than 50,000 plants, from which he was able to identify eight different mutation types. Again an illustration of combinatorics, a strong support for genetics, there being eight possible combinations of three symbols:
AAA AAB AAC ABB ABC BBC BCC CCC.
