AN INAUGURAL LECTURE DELIVERED 23 OCTOBER 1908 by W. BATESON, M.A., F.R.S. PROFESSOR OF BIOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE Cambridge: at the University Press 1912 First Edition 1908 Reprinted 1912...

The Professorship of Biology was founded in 1908 for a period of five years partly by the generosity of an anonymous benefactor, and partly by the University of Cambridge. The object of the endowment was the promotion of inquiries into the physiology of Heredity and Variation, a study now spoken of as Genetics. It is now recognized that the progress of such inquiries will chiefly be accomplished by the application of experimental methods, especially those which Mendel's discovery has suggested.