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
Johann Karl Nestler stock animals and their offspring Nestler hoped to explain the (genetic history). Examination of the records of the ancestors of the best breeding animals, called by Nestler "developmental history" () was for him the reverse side of the same coin. According to Wood and Orel the search for rules of heredity in sheep created an atmosphere of enquiry about heredity in general, which had influence on later work of Gregor Johann Mendel, himself a student at the Faculty of Philosophy in 1840–43. Nestler was also a very active member of the "Moravian-Silesian Society for Advancement of Agriculture" (, in which