Gregor Mendel publishes his experiments on plant hybrids

The Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel grew about 28,000 pea plants in the monastery garden at Brno between 1856 and 1863, crossing varieties with traits such as seed colour and plant height and counting the offspring. He found that traits are inherited as separate units, now called genes, that some are dominant and others recessive, and that they appear in predictable ratios such as 3 to 1. He read his results to the local natural history society in 1865 and published them in 1866. They were ignored until 1900, when Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns and Erich von Tschermak rediscovered them.

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