Namentlich hat Gärtner in seinem Werke “die Bastarderzeugung im Pflanzenreiche” sehr schätzbare Beobachtungen niedergelegt, und in neuester Zeit wurden von Wichura gründliche Untersuchungen über die Bastarde der Weiden veröffentlicht.
Gärtner, in particular, recorded very estimable observations in his work “The Production of Hybrids in the Plant Kingdom”, and most recently, Wichura published thorough investigations on the hybrids of willows.
estimable = schätzbare We follow Sherwood here, rather than Bateson, who has “valuable”. The expression schätzbare connotes esteem, but does not necessarily imply that the observations referred to are accurate also.
Gärtner in seinem Werke “die Bastarderzeugung im Pflanzenreiche” This is a reference to Carl Friedrich Gärtner, Versuche und Beobachtungen über die Bastarderzeugung im Pflanzenreich (Stuttgart: Hering, 1849; see previous sentence). A copy of Gärtner’s book is preserved in the library of the Augustinian Abbey in Brno. It contains copious annotations in Mendel’s hand.
Production of Hybrids = Bastarderzeugung; hybrids = Bastarde In English, the negative connotations of “bastard” are so strong, that we follow Bateson and Sherwood and use “hybrid” instead. It was quite common in nineteenth-century German natural history, though, to use the term Bastard for hybrid, despite the pejorative ring it already had back then; see, for example, Franz Unger, Grundlinien der Anatomie und Physiologie der Pflanzen (Vienna: Braumüller, 1866), p. 156. Mendel never uses the expression Bastard except when quoting older literature (for a further instance see p. 45, s. 2), and prefers Hybrid throughout his paper. It may be that, for him, the word Bastard was connected with the notion that hybridisation causes a pronounced decline in fertility which did not hold for the pea varieties he was working with; a footnote in Carl Naegeli, Entstehung und Begriff der naturhistorischen Art (München: Königl. Akademie, 1865, pp. 188–189), suggests such a meaning. Bronn’s translation of Darwin’s Origin, uses the word Bastard for hybrids formed from different species (“hybrid” in Darwin) and the word Blendlinge for hybrids from different varieties (“mongrel” in Darwin; see Charles R. Darwin, Über die Entstehung der Arten im Thier- und Pflanzen-Reich durch natürliche Züchtung, oder, Erhaltung der vervollkommneten Rassen im Kampfe um’s Daseyn, 2nd ed., transl. by H. G. Bronn, Stuttgart: Schweizerbart, 1863, p. 301); cf. p. 43, s. 1.