“Mendel treats such characters as yellowness of cotyledons and the like as if the condition of the character in two given parents determined its condition in all their subsequent offspring[147]. Now it is well known to breeders, and is clearly shown in a number of cases by Galton and Pearson, that the condition of an animal does not as a rule depend upon the condition of any one pair of ancestors alone, but in varying degrees upon the condition of all its ancestors in every past generation, the condition in each of the half-dozen nearest generations having a quite sensible effect. Mendel does not take the effect of differences of ancestry into account, but considers that any yellow-seeded pea, crossed with any green-seeded pea, will behave in a certain definite way, whatever the ancestry of the green and yellow peas may have been. (He does not say this in words, but his attempt to treat his results as generally true of the characters observed is unintelligible unless this hypothesis be assumed.) The experiments afford no evidence which can be held to justify this hypothesis. His observations on cotyledon colour, for example, are based upon 58 cross-fertilised flowers, all of which were borne upon ten plants; and we are not even told whether these ten plants included individuals from more than two races. [147] Mendel, on the contrary, disregards the “condition of the character” in the parent altogether; but is solely concerned with the nature of the characters of the _gametes_. “The many thousands of individuals raised from these ten plants afford an admirable illustration of the effect produced by crossing a few pairs of plants of known ancestry; but while they show this perhaps better than any similar experiment, they do not afford the data necessary for a statement as to the behaviour of yellow-seeded peas in general, whatever their ancestry, when crossed with green-seeded peas of any ancestry. [Mendel of course makes no such statement.] “When this is remembered, the importance of the exceptions to dominance of yellow cotyledon-colour, or of smooth and rounded shape of seeds, observed by Tschermak, is much increased; because although they form a small percentage of his whole result, they form a very large percentage of the results obtained with peas of certain races. [Certainly.] The fact that _Telephone_ behaved in crossing on the whole like a green-seeded race of exceptional dominance shows that something other than the mere character of the parental generation operated in this case. Thus in eight out of 27 seeds from the yellow _Pois d’Auvergne_ ♀ × _Telephone_ ♂ the cotyledons were yellow with green patches; the reciprocal cross gave two green and one yellow-and-green seed out of the whole ten obtained; and the cross _Telephone_ ♀ × (yellow-seeded) _Buchsbaum_[148] ♂ gave on one occasion two green and four yellow seeds. [148] Regarding this “exception” see p. 146.