Diesen Experimenten wurde eine besondere Wichtigkeit beigelegt, Gärtner rechnet dieselben zu den “allerschwierigsten in der Bastarderzeugung”.
Special importance was attached to these experiments; Gärtner counts them among “the most difficult of all in the production of hybrids”.
This is another sentence where two independent sentences are joined into one by a comma. Like Sherwood, we reflect this by a semicolon. Bateson inserts an “and”.
Gärtner The quotation is from Carl Friedrich Gärtner, Versuche und Beobachtungen über die Bastarderzeugung im Pflanzenreich (Stuttgart: Hering, 1849), p. 475.
production of hybrids = Bastarderzeugung See p. 3, s. 5 on the German word Bastard. Bateson translates “hybridisation”, Sherwood “hybrid production”. Our translation is more literal, and preserves the idea, prominent in both Kölreuter and Gärtner, that hybrids are largely a product of human art. Darwin spoke of the “fabrication” of hybrids — but with the telling twist that he saw it going on in nature — in a passage that Mendel marked with a line in the margin; 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), Mendel Museum, Collection of the Augustinian Abbey, p. 68; cf. p. 43, s. 9, where Gärtner is quoted with the expression “business of transformation” (Umwandlungsgeschäfte).