In contrast to the formula for the monohybrid cross presented on p. 30, s. 7, Mendel uses “or” here instead of an equality sign to relate the possible pairings of germ and pollen cells of different kind presented “in the form of fractions” to their products presented using his notation system. In the manuscript, Mendel arranged the terms of the first two formulas above each other, so that it was easy to derive the genetic constitution of the zygote from the combination of gametes. The typesetter could not entirely reproduce this. One wonders nevertheless how Mendel presented these findings to his audience when giving his presentation at the meeting of the Naturalist Association in Brno; he probably used a chalk board. Should he instead have read this out, the apocryphal long silence that followed his talk would find a natural explanation.

[=] The formula presenting genetic constitutions contains a desastrous misprint, which Mendel corrected by hand in the offprints he sent out: after + ab in the fourth line, there should follow an equal sign (here, indeed, with an algebraic meaning), but the typesetter entered a plus sign. Bateson noticed this in the first English translation by Druery already, adding a footnote that pointed out the evident misprint. Tschermak, in contrast, did not notice it in his 1901 edition of Mendel’s text, and retained the plus sign.