Plant genetics He worked at the Abbey of St. Thomas in Bruno , where his organism of choice for studying inheritance and traits was the pea plant. Mendel's work tracked many phenotypic traits of pea plants, such as their height, flower color, and seed characteristics. Mendel showed that the inheritance of these traits follows two particular laws, which were later named after him. His seminal work on genetics, “Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden” (Experiments on Plant Hybrids), was published in 1866, but went almost entirely unnoticed until 1900 when prominent botanists in the UK, like Sir Gavin de Beer, recognized its importance and re-published
Heredity to work (noticing that traits that were not expressed explicitly in the parent at the time of reproduction could be inherited, that certain traits could be sex-linked, etc.) rather than suggesting mechanisms. Darwin's initial model of heredity was adopted by, and then heavily modified by, his cousin Francis Galton, who laid the framework for the biometric school of heredity. Galton found no evidence to support the aspects of Darwin's pangenesis model, which relied on acquired traits. The inheritance of acquired traits was shown to have little basis in the 1880s when August Weismann cut the tails off many generations of