essor of Biology at Bryn Mawr, and one of the
best known of our American biologists, whose recent work on
"Regeneration" has attracted favorable notice all over the world,
calls attention to the revolutionary character of Mendel's discovery.
He considers that recent demonstrations of the mathematical truth of
Mendel's Law absolutely confirm Mendel's original observations, and
the movement thus initiated, in Professor Morgan's eyes, gives the
final _coup de grace_ to the theory of natural selection. "If," he
says, "we reject Darwin's theory of natural selection as an
explanation of evolution, we have at least a new and promising outlook
in another direction and are in a position to answer the oft-heard but
unscientific query of those who must cling to some dogma: if you
reject Darwin, what better have you to offer?"

{198}

Professor Edmund B. Wilson, the Director of the Zoological Laboratory
of Columbia University, called attention in _Science_ (19 December,
1902) to the fact that studies in cytology, that is to say,
observations on the formation, development, and maturation of cells,
confirm Mendel's principles of inheritance and thus furnish another
proof of the truth of these principles.

Two students working in Professor Wilson's laboratory have obtained
definite evidence in favor of the cytological explanation of Mendel's
principles, and have thus made an important step in the solution of
one of the important fundamental mysteries of cell development in the
very early life of organisms.

In a paper read before the American Academy of Arts and Sciences last
year, Professor W. E. Castle, of Harvard University, said with regard
to Mendel's Law of Heredity:--

What will doubtless rank as one of the greatest discoveries in the
study of biology, and in the study of heredity, perhaps the
greatest, was made by Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, in the garden
of his cloister, some forty years ago. The discovery was announced
in the proceedings of a fairly well-known scientific society, but
seems to have attracted little attention, and to have been soon
forgotten. The Darwinian theory then occupied the centre of the
scientific stage, and Mendel's brilliant discovery was all but
unnoticed for a third of a century. Meanwhile, the discussion
aroused by Weissman's germ plasm theory, in particular the idea of
the non-inheritance of acquired characters, put the scientific
public into a more receptive f