It is not often possible to pinpoint the origin of a whole new branch of science accurately in time and place, because, as Isaac Newton said, there are usually so many precursors on whose shoulders the successor stands and is thereby able to see further than they. But genetics is an exception, for it owes its origin to one man, Gregor Johann Mendel, who expounded its basic principles at Brno on 8 February and 8 March 1865. If a precursor is a man who, at an earlier date, makes a discovery which his successor is able to expand into a general principle of universal validity, Mendel had no precursors. There were not wanting breeders who hybridized plants: Joseph Gottlieb Koelreuter, Carl Friedrich von Gaertner, and William Herbert, to mention only the chief names, but what they were studying was not really basic genetics at all. They wanted to know if sterility in a hybrid is the fault of the pollen-parent or the seed-parent, whether either parent could be held responsible for the characters of different specified regions of the plant, or which had prepotency over the characters of the hybrid. The parent races that they chose for their crossing experiments were either different species, or varieties differing in large numbers of characters, and the results which they obtained were chaotic, inconstant, and contradictory, and led to no general principles at all. This was the difference between previous attempts to study heredity, and the Mendelian revolution that resulted in genetics.