Artificial fertilisations = Künstliche Befruchtungen It is not clear to which experiments Mendel is referring here. Notes by the Brno plant breeder N. Twrdy show that Mendel bred fuchsias, however, and a famous group portrait with his fellow monks from 1862 shows him with a fuchsia sprig; see Hugo Iltis, Gregor Johann Mendel: Leben, Werk und Wirkung (Berlin: Springer, 1924), p. 142; see also Vítězslav Orel, Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 222–225.

ornamental plants = Zierpflanzen Mendel set a small star against a paragraph dealing with “ornamental plants” (Ziergewächse) in the copy of Gärtner’s Versuche und Beobachtungen held by the Augustinian Abbey’s library. In this paragraph, Gärtner made the point that “aesthetic botany” (ästhetische Botanik) provides the “amateur” (Liebhaber) “with an inexhaustible source of joy and profit […]. He recognizes from the different species of each genus, that he is in possession of materials, with which he can busy himself, and he reflects how he can combine them in the best and most useful way; by attending to the properties by which each species is marked […] he will provisionally try to calculate with some probability the potential appearance of a hybrid he endeavours to produce; and he will finally be surprised to obtain a plant that has never existed before in nature” (eine unerschöpfliche Quelle von Vergnügen und Nutzen […]. Er erkennt in den verschiedenen Arten jeder Gattung, dass er im Besitz von Materialien ist, mit welchen er sich beschäftigen kann, und er überlegt auf welche Art und Weise er sie am besten und nützlichsten verbinden kann; indem er auf die Eigenschaften achtet, worin jede Art sich auszeichnet […] wird [er] vorläufig mit einiger Wahrscheinlichkeit die mögliche Ansicht der Hybride zu berechnen versuchen; welche er zu erzeugen sich bemüht: er wird endlich überrascht werden eine Pflanze zu erhalten, welche in der Natur zuvor niemals existirt hatte); see Carl Friedrich Gärtner, Versuche und Beobachtungen über die Bastarderzeugung im Pflanzenreich (Stuttgart: Hering, 1849), Mendel Museum, Collection of the Augustinian Abbey, p. 639.

colour variants = Farben-Varianten Bateson has “variations in colour”. Variante is different, though, both from the German Variation (a term which corresponds to “variation” in English, but which Mendel does not use in his paper) and Varietät (which Mendel uses; see for example p. 7, s. 1). Whereas these two expressions tend to imply discrete differences, Variante implies variation by slight degrees, for example in colour, shape or size (see Carl Friedrich Gärtner, Versuche und Beobachtungen über die Bastarderzeugung im Pflanzenreich, Stuttgart: Hering, 1849, pp. 245–249; see also p. 37, s. 10). We therefore followed Sherwood’s translation.

that … here = die h[i]er The manuscript had welch[e] which was deleted and replaced by die. The print version has her, which Mendel manually corrected into hier; the manuscript also has hier.

reviewed = besprochen Both Bateson and Sherwood have “discussed”. The verb besprechen indicates hindsight, and would be used, for example, for writing a book review.