ABSTRACT
The new science of genetics was born from the explosion of ideas that occurred with the rediscovery of Mendel. But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. Ironically, it was the botanists who were the most hostile to, and held out the longest against, the new theories of “Mendelism.” Even that august British journal Nature, in which the announcements of many famous discoveries have fi rst appeared, refused for several years to publish papers on the subject, choosing instead to support the rival theories of the Biometricians , who constituted the opposition. To understand what happened at the beginning of the twentieth century we must dip back briefl y into the nineteenth, to fi nd out who saw what when and to understand the prevailing beliefs that these sights engendered.
