C HAPTER 1

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B EFORE M ENDEL

In discussing the history of a subject it is usual to begin with Aris-

totle— and he forms a convenient starting point for genetics, though the
real beginnings, even of theoretical genetics, go farther back. As a matter
of fact, much of Aristotle’s discussion of the subject is contained in his
criticism of the earlier views of Hippocrates.
Hippocrates had developed a theory resembling that later proposed
by Darwin, who called it “pangenesis.” According to this view, each part
of the body produces something (called “gemmules” by Darwin) which is
then somehow collected in the “semen”— or as we should now say, the
germ cells. These are the material basis of heredity, since they develop
into the characters of the offspring. The view was developed, both by
Hippocrates and by Darwin, largely to explain the supposed inheritance
of acquired characters. Aristotle devoted a long passage to criticism of
this hypothesis, which he discarded for several reasons. He pointed out
that individuals sometimes resemble remote ancestors rather than their
immediate parents (which is in fact one of the arguments used by Darwin
for, rather than against, pangenesis, since Darwin did not suppose that
the gemmules necessarily came to expression in the first generation and
did not suppose, as did Hippocrates, that they were released from the
parts of the body at the moment of copulation). Aristotle also pointed out
that peculiarities of hair and nails, and even of gait and other habits of
movement, may reappear in offspring, and that these are difficult to in-
terpret in terms of a simple form of the hypothesis. Characters not yet
present in an individual may also be inherited— such things as gray hair
or type of beard from a young father— even before his beard or grayness
develops. More important, he pointed out that the effects of mutilations
or loss of parts, both in animals and in plants, are often not inherited.
Aristotle, like everyone else until much later, accepted the inheritance of
acquired characters; but he was nevertheless aware that there was no
simple one-to-one relation between the presence of a part in parents and

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2 A H I ST O RY OF G EN ET IC S

its development in their offspring. His general conclusion was that what
is inherited is not characters themselves in any sense but only the poten-
tiality of producing them. Today this sounds self-evident, but at that time
it was an important conclusion, which was not always fully understood,
even by the early Mendelians.
Aristotle was a naturalist and described many kinds of animals—
some imaginary, others real and described in surprisingly accurate detail.
He knew about the mule and supposed that other animals were species
hybrids— that the giraffe, for example, was a hybrid between the camel
and the leopard. According to him, in the dry country of Libya there are
few places where water is available; therefore many kinds of animals
congregate around the water holes. If they are somewhere near the same
size, and have similar gestation periods, they may cross; this is the basis
for the saying that “something new is always coming from Libya.”
Some later authorities disregarded Aristotle’s reasonable limitations
on what forms might be expected to cross, as in the conclusion that the
ostrich is a hybrid between the sparrow and the camel. There is a long
history of such supposed hybrids— notably of the crossing between the
viper and the eel, and of the hybrid between the horse and the cow.
Zirkle records accounts of both of these as late as the seventeenth
century.
The knowledge of sex in animals goes far back before the beginnings
of history and was understood quite early even in plants— at least in two
important food plants of the Near East, namely, the Smyrna fig and the
date palm, both of which are dioecious (that is to say, have separate male
and female trees). Zirkle shows that a special Near Eastern deity (the
cherub) was supposed to preside over the date pollination, and that repre-
sentations of this deity can be traced back to about 1000 B.C. There is, in
fact, evidence that male and female trees were grown separately as early
as 2400 B.C.
The condition found in these two trees was definitely related to the
phenomenon of sex in animals, by Aristotle and others, but it was much
later that it was realized that plants in general have a sexual process.
That the higher plants do have sexual reproduction and that the
pollen represents the male element seems to have been first indicated
as an important generalization by Nehemiah Grew in 1676. A sound
experimental basis was first given by Camerarius (1691 to 1694).
From that time on, the view was rather generally accepted, especially
after Linnaeus presented more evidence and lent the prestige of his
name in 1760.
 B EFORE M ENDEL 3

More or less casual observations on natural or accidental hybrids in

plants were made over a long period, beginning with the observations of
Cotton Mather on maize in 1716. However, the systematic study of plant
hybrids dates from the work of Kölreuter, published from 1761 to 1766.
His work laid the foundations of the subject and was familiar to Darwin
and to Mendel, both of whom discussed it a hundred years later.
Kölreuter made many crosses, studied the pollination process itself,
and also recognized the importance of insects in natural pollination. He
used a simple microscope to study the structure of pollen and was the
first to describe the diversity of pollen grains found in seed plants. He
also made studies on the germination of pollen. These studies on germi-
nation were carried out on pollen in water, with the result that the pollen
tubes plasmolyzed almost immediately. This led Kölreuter to conclude
that the fertilizing agent was the fluid released on the stigma, rather than
a formed element from a particular pollen grain.
In another respect he reached a wrong conclusion that delayed the
development of a clear understanding of fertilization, namely, the view
that more than one pollen grain is necessary for the production of a nor-
mal seed. This view was based on experiments with counted numbers of
pollen grains, which seemed conclusive to him. The result was generally
accepted for some time, and even Darwin adopted it (The Variation of
Animals and Plants under Domestication, Ch. 27) on the authority of
Kölreuter, and of Gärtner, who later confirmed the experiments. Kölreu-
ter supposed, as a result of his experiments, that he could recognize
“half-hybrids,” that is, individual plants derived from pollen that was
partly from the seed parent and partly from a different plant. Like Aris-
totle and other predecessors, he thought of fertilization as resulting from
a mixing of fluids, basing this in part on his direct observations of germi-
nating pollen.
His observations on the hybrids themselves were of importance. He
recognized that they were usually intermediate between the parents (he
was nearly always using strains that differed in many respects), but he
did record a few cases where they resembled one parent. He recognized
the sterility often found in hybrids between widely different forms and
showed that in some of these the pollen was empty. He emphasized the
identity of the hybrids from reciprocal crosses— which is rather surpris-
ing, since plastid differences might have been expected in some of such a
large number of reciprocal species hybrids.
Kölreuter reported a few instances of increased variability in the off-
spring of hybrids but laid no emphasis on this observation. He also ob-
served the frequent great increase in the vegetative vigor of hybrids and
4 A H I ST O RY OF G EN ET IC S

suggested that it might be of economic importance, especially if hybrid

timber trees could be produced.
Following Kölreuter, there were a number of men engaged in the
study of plant hybrids. Detailed accounts of their work are given by
Roberts (1929), but perhaps the most satisfactory general account of the
state of knowledge in Mendel’s time is to be found in Darwin’s discus-
sion in The Variation in Animals and Plants under Domestication
(1868).*
Darwin collected a vast amount of information from the works of the
plant hybridizers, from works on the practical breeding of domestic ani-
mals and cultivated plants, and from gardeners, sportsmen, and fanciers.
He himself carried out numerous experiments with pigeons and with
various plants. The book is still interesting, as a source of information
and of curious observations. Darwin was looking for generalizations, and
extracting them from masses of observations was his special ability. But,
in the case of heredity, the method yielded very little. He recognized two
more or less distinct types of variations— those that came to be known as
continuous and discontinuous, respectively. The latter, sometimes called
“sports,” he recognized as sometimes showing dominance, and as being
often transmitted unchanged through many generations. But he felt that
they were relatively unimportant as compared to the continuously vary-
ing characters, which could be changed gradually by selection and which
gave intermediate hybrids on crossing. He concluded that crossing has a
unifying effect. Since hybrids are generally intermediate between their
parents, crossing tends to keep populations uniform, while inbreeding
tends to lead to differences between populations; this same conclusion is
shared by modern genetics, though the arguments are not quite the same
as Darwin’s.
He reported crosses which led to increased variability in the second
and later generations, but he was interested in them chiefly because of
their bearing on the question of reversion to ancestral types. He also rec-
ognized the increase in vigor that often results from crossing and ob-
served the usual decline due to continued inbreeding. He carried out
numerous detailed experiments in this field, which are elaborated in one
of his later books, (The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilization in the
Vegetable Kingdom, 1876).
On the origin of variability, Darwin had little to say that sounds

* Darwin’s books were extensively altered in successive editions, and it is not

always safe to consult a later edition and then to assign the views given therein to the
date of the first edition. Although I have not seen the first edition of the book, I have no
reason to suppose that its date is misleading in this connection.
 B EFORE M ENDEL 5

modern. He thought that changed conditions, such as domestication,

stimulated variability and also affected the inheritance both in selection
within a strain and in crosses between strains. The effects of selection
were familiar to him, but he was not aware of the basic distinction be-
tween genetically and environmentally produced small variations.
Darwin’s own theory of heredity (pangenesis) was not generally well
received, but it did apparently serve to suggest the particulate theories of
Weismann and of de Vries, which paved the way in 1900 for the appre-
ciation of Mendel’s work.
The development of ideas about inheritance in animals and in plants
was rather independent, for in plants the early experiments were directed
largely toward the demonstration of sexual reproduction, which needed
no demonstration in animals. This led to the study of hybrid plants, but in
animals the development was largely in the hands of practical breeders,
who were more concerned with selection than with crossing. One of the
striking things about Darwin was that he had a detailed firsthand knowl-
edge of both animals and plants, and of the literature on both. In his work
we find the modern custom of discussing theory without regard to the
distinction between animals and plants. It is true that this had been done
before— by Aristotle, for example— but not to the extent that Darwin
introduced. It may be noted that the previous hybridizers referred to in
Mendel’s paper (Kölreuter, Gärtner, Herbert, Lecoq, and Wichura) were
all botanists. Since Mendel referred to them, we may suppose that they
influenced his work; therefore there follow brief accounts of the last four,
since Kölreuter has already been discussed.
Gärtner’s work was published largely in 1839 and in 1849. He made
a large number of crosses. Roberts says that “he carried out nearly
10,000 separate experiments in crossing, among 700 species, belonging
to 80 different genera of plants, and obtained in all some 350 different
hybrid plants.” In general, he confirmed much of Kölreuter’s work, but
added little that was new, except for an insistence on the greater vari-
ability of F2 (the second generation) compared to F1 (the first genera-
tion). He did not often describe the separate characters of his plants but
rather treated them as whole organisms— a habit common to many of the
older hybridizers. Mendel gave a good deal of space to a discussion of
Gärtner’s results. He interpreted them as due in part to the multiplicity of
gene differences between the plants crossed— which in F2 resulted in
great rarity of individuals closely resembling the parents. Gärtner also
carried out experiments with several plants that involved back-crossing
hybrids in successive generations to one of the parental species, in an
6 A H I ST O RY OF G EN ET IC S

effort to see how many such backcrosses would be needed to eliminate

the characters of the other parent. Mendel did a few experiments of this
kind with peas and found, as he expected, that the result depends on the
proportion of dominant genes in the parent to which the back-crossing is
done. He suggested that this factor must always complicate experiments
of the kind carried out by Gärtner (and earlier similar crosses made by
Kölreuter).
The work of Herbert, published between 1819 and 1847, dealt
chiefly with crosses among ornamental plants. Perhaps his most impor-
tant contribution was his discussion of the idea that crosses between spe-
cies are unsuccessful or yield sterile hybrids, while crosses between
varieties yield fertile offspring. He pointed out that there is no sharp line
here, and that the degree of structural difference between two forms is
not an invariable index of the fertility of their hybrids. In short, the ar-
gument is a circular one: infertility between species and fertility between
varieties can be concluded only if fertility and sterility are made the cri-
teria by which species and varieties are defined.
Lecoq (published 1827 to 1862) was interested in the breeding of
improved agricultural plants. He made many crosses and discussed the
results of other hybridizers, but seems to have added little that advanced
the subject.
Wichura’s chief paper appeared in 1865, after Mendel’s experiments
were completed; he therefore could scarcely have influenced the plan-
ning of Mendel’s crosses. His work was on the crossing of willows; per-
haps the most striking passages have to do with the necessity for extreme
care in preventing unwanted pollen from confusing the experiments, and
his strong insistence on the identity of reciprocal hybrids— the latter be-
ing a point that Lecoq had believed was not correct.
Two other people in this period should be discussed, since both have
been cited as having in some respects anticipated Mendel’s point of
view.
Maupertuis was even earlier than Kölreuter, his work having been
published between 1744 and 1756. He reported on a human pedigree
showing polydactylism, and discussed albinism in man and a color pat-
tern in dogs. He also developed a theory of heredity somewhat like Dar-
win’s pangenesis. Glass (1947) has reviewed this work in detail; he sees
Maupertuis, in some respects, as a forerunner of Mendel. This is, to my
mind, based largely on the interpretation of rather obscure passages in
terms of what we now know. In any case, it is clear that Maupertuis had
little or no effect on later developments in the study of heredity.
 B EFORE M ENDEL 7

Naudin, a contemporary of Mendel, published his accounts between

1855 and 1869. He studied a series of crosses involving several genera of
plants. In several respects he made real advances. Like several of his
predecessors, he emphasized the identity of reciprocal hybrids. He also
emphasized the relative uniformity of F1 as contrasted to the great vari-
ability of F2; and he saw the recombination of parental differences in F2.
But there was no analytical approach, no ratios were recognized, and no
simple and testable interpretations were presented. The expression “laws
of Naudin-Mendel,” sometimes seen in the literature, is wholly unjusti-
fied.
Mendel’s analysis could not have been made without some knowl-
edge of the facts of fertilization— specifically, that one egg and one
sperm unite to form the zygote. This was not known until a few years
before his time and was not generally recognized even then. Darwin, for
example, thought that more than one sperm was needed for each egg,
both in animals and in plants.
Direct observations on fertilization had to wait for the development
of microscopes. Leeuwenhoek saw animal spermatozoa under a micro-
scope in 1677 and thought that one was sufficient to fertilize an egg—
but this was neither directly observed, nor generally accepted, for ani-
mals, until two hundred years later (see Chapter 3). * In the lower plants,
fertilization was observed by Thuret in 1853 (Fucus), Pringsheim in 1856
(Oedogonium), and De Bary in 1861 (fungi). In seed plants, the work of
Amici was especially important. In 1823 he recorded the production of
the pollen tube, which in 1830 he traced to the ovary and even to the mi-
cropyle. In 1846 he showed that in orchids, there is a cell already present
in the ovule, which, inactive until the pollen tube arrives, then develops
into the embryo. This work was confirmed and extended by Hofmeister
and others, so that Mendel could write in his paper: “In the opinion of
renowned physiologists, for the purpose of propagation one pollen cell
and one egg cell unite in Phanerogams into a single cell, which is capable
by assimilation and formation of new cells, of becoming an independent
organism.” Nevertheless, there was not general agreement on the point.
Naudin (1863) repeated the experiments of Kölreuter and of Gärtner,
placing counted numbers of pollen grains on stigmas and concluding that
a fully viable seed required more than one grain. It appears, from his let-

* Leeuwenhoek also saw conjugation in ciliated Protozoa (1695), but this

observation was not understood until the unicellular nature of these animals was made
out two centuries later.
8 A H I ST O RY OF G EN ET IC S

ters to Nägeli, that Mendel himself also repeated this experiment (using
Mirabilis, as had Naudin) and found that a single grain was sufficient. He
did not publish this result, and does not refer to this approach to the
question in his paper.