Nevertheless the total neglect of such a discovery is not easy to account for. Those who are acquainted with the literature of this branch of inquiry will know that the French Academy offered a prize in 1861 to be awarded in 1862 on the subject “_Étudier les Hybrides végétaux au point de vue de leur fécondité et de la perpétuité de leurs caractères_.” This subject was doubtless chosen with reference to the experiments of Godron of Nancy and Naudin, then of Paris. Both these naturalists competed, and the accounts of the work of Godron on _Datura_ and of Naudin on a number of species were published in the years 1864 and 1865 respectively. Both, especially the latter, are works of high consequence in the history of the science of heredity. In the latter paper Naudin clearly enuntiated what we shall henceforth know as the Mendelian conception of the dissociation of characters of cross-breds in the formation of the germ-cells, though apparently he never developed this conception. In the year 1864, George Bentham, then President of the Linnean Society, took these treatises as the subject of his address to the Anniversary meeting on the 24 May, Naudin’s work being known to him from an abstract, the full paper having not yet appeared. Referring to the hypothesis of dissociation which he fully described, he said that it appeared to be new and well supported, but required much more confirmation before it could be held as proven. (_J. Linn. Soc., Bot._, VIII., _Proc._, p. XIV.) In 1865, the year of Mendel’s communication to the Brünn Society, appeared Wichura’s famous treatise on his experiments with _Salix_ to which Mendel refers. There are passages in this memoir which come very near Mendel’s principles, but it is evident from the plan of his experiments that Mendel had conceived the whole of his ideas before that date. In 1868 appeared the first edition of Darwin’s _Animals and Plants_, marking the very zenith of these studies, and thenceforth the decline in the experimental investigation of Evolution and the problem of Species has been steady. With the rediscovery and confirmation of Mendel’s work by de Vries, Correns and Tschermak in 1900 a new era begins. That Mendel’s work, appearing as it did, at a moment when several naturalists of the first rank were still occupied with these problems, should have passed wholly unnoticed, will always remain inexplicable, the more so as the Brünn Society exchanged its publications with most of the Academies of Europe, including both the Royal and Linnean Societies.