Imre Festetics Festetics’s observations highlighted important correlations between variability, adaptation, and development. He also noted the consequences of selection and its role in heredity, believing that variability and his postulated laws of genetics were connected, acting together in breeding as well as in the natural processes controlling populations of different animals,including humans. Festetics, however, was ultimately hindered by the complex nature of his study traits, aspects of wool quality that we now know to be polygenic. When Gregor Mendel turned his attention to inheritance in peas he the latest in a line of Moravian researchers and agriculturalists who had been thinking about
54 Parkside the Royal Horticultural Society, of which he was also a Council member. He was appointed a member of the Appeal Tribunal (a special court set up to reconsider a decision by another court) for the County of Berkshire in 1916. One of his friends was William Bateson (1861-1926), an advocate of the ideas of Gregor Mendel who introduced the term ‘genetics’ to describe the study of heredity and whose 1894 book Materials for the Study of Variation was one of the earliest formulations of the new approach to genetics. Sutton provided the means for Bateson to carry out extensive studies