ABSTRACT
The prevailing view of heredity during the middle of the 19th century assumed two gross misconceptions: the acceptance of a blending of hereditary factors and the heritability of acquired characters. Evidence for a particulate basis for inheritance, such as the reappearance of ancestral traits, was common knowledge but considered exceptional. In fact, all the “discoveries” attributed to MENDEL, such as the equivalence of reciprocal crosses, dominance, uniformity of hybrids, and segregation in the generation following hybridization, are gleanable from the pre-Mendelian literature.
