Mendelism / by R.C. Punnett.

  • Punnett, Reginald Crundall, 1875-1967.
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Mendelism / by R.C. Punnett. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    CHAPTER I THE PROBLEM A CURIOUS thing in the history of human thought, so far as literature reveals it to us, is the strange lack of interest shown in one of the most interesting of all human relationships. Few if any of the more primitive peoples seem to have attempted to define the part played by either parent in the formation of the offspring, or to have assigned peculiar powers of transmission to them, even in the vaguest way. For ages man must have been more or less con- sciously improving his domesticated races of animals and plants, yet it is not until the time of Aristotle that we have clear evidence of any hypothesis to account for these phenomena of heredity. The pro¬ duction of offspring by man was then held to be similar to the production of a crop from seed. The seed came from the man, the woman provided the soil. This remained the generally accepted view for many centuries, and it was not until the recognition of woman as more than a passive agent that the physical basis of heredity became established. That recognition was effected by the microscope, for only with its advent was actual observation of the minute I В