Mendelian inheritance inheritance were named for and first derived by Gregor Johann Mendel, a nineteenth-century Moravian monk who formulated his ideas after conducting simple hybridisation experiments with pea plants ("Pisum sativum") he had planted in the garden of his monastery. Between 1856 and 1863, Mendel cultivated and tested some 5,000 pea plants. From these experiments, he induced two generalizations which later became known as "Mendel's Principles of Heredity" or "Mendelian inheritance". He described these principles in a two-part paper, "Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden" ("Experiments on Plant Hybridization"), that he read to the Natural History Society of Brno on 8 February and 8 March
History of plant breeding History of plant breeding Plant breeding started with sedentary agriculture, particularly the domestication of the first agricultural plants, a practice which is estimated to date back 9,000 to 11,000 years. Initially, early human farmers selected food plants with particular desirable characteristics and used these as a seed source for subsequent generations, resulting in an accumulation of characteristics over time. In time however, experiments began with deliberate hybridization, the science and understanding of which was greatly enhanced by the work of Gregor Mendel. Mendel's work ultimately led to the new science of genetics. Modern plant breeding is applied genetics, but its