Der Erfolg musste endlich zeigen, ob sie in hybrider Vereinigung sämmtlich ein übereinstimmendes Verhalten beobachten, und ob daraus auch ein Urtheil über jene Merkmale möglich wird, welche eine untergeordnete typische Bedeutung haben.
In the end, success had to show whether they [i.e., the selected characters] all follow a concordant behaviour in hybrid union, and whether from this a judgement becomes possible about those traits too that have a subordinate typical significance.
success = Erfolg Both Bateson and Sherwood have “result”, but Erfolg usually implies attainment of a goal, not just a consequence or result of an action, although it rarely still had that meaning sometimes in the nineteenth century; see Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, online-edition, s.v. “erfolg” (1860).
had to show = musste … zeigen Bateson has “must show”, Sherwood “should … show”, as if Mendel was formulating an expectation here. The German original, however, is without doubt formulated in the past tense, which is significant since this indicates that Mendel selected the character pairs he wanted to focus on in his presentation in retrospect, that is, after he had “successfully” performed his experiments.
hybrid union = hybrider Vereinigung See p. 41, s. 6.
subsidiary typical significance = untergeordnete typische Bedeutung Bateson has “subordinate significance in type” and Sherwood has “minor significance in a classification”. It is possible that this refers to the less distinctive, quantitative traits discussed in the previous two sentences, but Mendel may equally well have had traits in mind that do not follow the “concordant behaviour” of the traits chosen for presentation. On p. 37, he does indeed discuss a case where hybrids from colour varieties of Phaseolus multiflorus do not seem to follow the law of segregation, and tries to resolve this by assuming multifactorial inheritance.