ABSTRACT
Charles Darwin was usually meticulous in assimilating new materials and making notes about it. He was corresponding with several top European scientists who were working on the broad issue of heredity. Darwin had personally done and was still doing large numbers of plant-breeding experiments using more than fifty plant species, including the edible pea, orchid, snapdragon, flax, primrose, and so on, but never with the idea of primarily studying the transmission of plant characters between generations. He was more interested in the problem of hybrid vigor and its role for evolution. Probably Darwin would have been incredulous at Gregor Mendel's claims because according to the gemmule hypothesis we could never get exact mathematical relationships occurring from one generation to the next because of the variable number of gemmules that would be involved.
