You will be aware that the claims put forward in the name of Genetics are high, but I trust to be able to show you that they are not high without reason. It is the ambition of every one who in youth devotes himself to the search for natural truth, that his work may be found somewhere in the main stream of progress. So long only as he keeps something of the limitless hope with which his voyage of discovery began, will his courage and his spirit last. The moment we most dread is one in which it may appear that, after all, our effort has been spent in exploring some petty tributary, or worse, a backwater of the great current. It is because Genetic research is still pushing forward in the central undifferentiated trunk of biological science that we confess no guilt of presumption in declaring boldly that whatever difficulty may be in store for those who cast in their lot with us, they need fear no disillusionment or misgiving that their labour has been wasted on a paltry quest. In research, as in all business of exploration, the stirring times come when a fresh region is suddenly unlocked by the discovery of a new key. Then conquest is easy and there are prizes for all. We are happy in that during our own time not a few such territories have been revealed to the vision of mankind. I do not dare to suggest that in magnitude or splendour the field of Genetics may be compared with that now being disclosed to the physicist or the astronomer; for the glory of the celestial is one and the glory of the terrestrial is another. But I will say that for once to the man of ordinary power who cannot venture into those heights beyond, Mendel's clue has shown the way into a realm of nature which for surprising novelty and adventure is hardly to be excelled. It is no hyperbolical figure that I use when I speak of Mendelian discovery leading us into a new world, the very existence of which was unsuspected before. The road thither is simple and easy to follow. We start from a common fact, familiar to everyone, that all the ordinary animals and plants began their individual life by the union of two cells, the one male, the other female. Those cells are known as germ-cells or _gametes_, that is to say, "marrying" cells.