Auch beschränkt sich die gemachte Voraussetzung darauf, dass bei der Bildung der verschiedenartigen Keim- und Pollenzellen die gleiche Anzahl angestrebt werde, ohne dass diese an jeder einzelnen Hybride mit mathematischer Genauigkeit erreicht werden müsste.
The presupposition made, moreover, confines itself to the claim that the same quantity is aspired to in the formation of the germ- and pollen cells of various kind, without this having to be attained on each individual hybrid with mathematical exactness.
quantity = Anzahl See p. 3, s. 8.
aspired to = angestrebt Bateson and Sherwood reformulate this sentence into a statement of what the presupposition “demands” or “requires” only. Mendel’s formulation, however, consists in a more direct qualification of what it is that the presupposition actually claims . The expression angestrebt thus admits some kind of inner formative drive or natural tendency in the organism. The whole sentence is curious, since the statistical nature of the assumptions to be tested seems to have been expressed clearly enough in the preceding sections of Mendel’s paper. It may be that Mendel had in mind readers not familiar with statistics and probability theory, or even that he himself retained a notion of probability where deviation from expectation is seen as a kind of failure rather than a purely stochastic process.