Gregor Mendel pod shape, unripe pod color, flower location, and plant height. He first focused on seed shape, which was either angular or round. Between 1856 and 1863 Mendel cultivated and tested some 28,000 plants, the majority of which were pea plants ("Pisum sativum"). This study showed that, when true-breeding different varieties were crossed to each other (e.g., tall plants fertilized by short plants), in the second generation, one in four pea plants had purebred recessive traits, two out of four were hybrids, and one out of four were purebred dominant. His experiments led him to make two generalizations, the Law of
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