Accordingly, if we confine our study to the two contrasted characters,
tallness and dwarfness, we see that just three kinds of peas exist,
namely, dwarfs which breed true, talls which breed true, and talls which
always give the same definite proportion of talls and dwarfs among their
descendants. Innumerable experiments which have since been made with
other pairs of characters have demonstrated that this same mathematical
proportion holds good throughout the whole world of plants and
animals;[25] and hence this astonishing result is now called Mendel's
Law, and is regarded as the most important discovery in biology in
several generations.
[Footnote 25: When dealing with only a few individual cases, we do not
always find them to come out in such exact proportion; but when the
number of examples is large, the proportion is so close to these figures
that the exceptions can be entirely neglected as probably due to error
of some kind.]
There are two distinct kinds of Andalusian fowls, one pure bred black,
the other pure bred white with slight dashes of black here and there.
When these are mated, no matter which color is the father or the mother,
the next or hybrid generation are always a queer mixture of black and
white called by fanciers blue.
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