Edition 97.1 (February 22, 1997)

The current edition of MendelWeb is now available at Netspace (in Providence, Rhode Island), at the University of Washington at Seattle (thanks to the generosity of Alan Cairns), and at the Scholarly Technology Group site, at Brown University (also in Providence).

I am always happy to receive your comments, suggestions, and corrections.
Roger B. Blumberg (rblum@netspace.org)

"In 1859 I obtained a very fertile descendant with large, tasty seeds from a first generation hybrid. Since in the following year, its progeny retained the desirable characteristics and were uniform, the variety was cultivated in our vegetable garden, and many plants were raised every year up to 1865."
(Gregor Mendel to Carl Nägeli, April 1867, from Mendel [1950])

What is MendelWeb?

MendelWeb is an educational resource for teachers and students interested in the origins of classical genetics, introductory data analysis, elementary plant science, and the history and literature of science. Constructed around Gregor Mendel's 1865 paper "Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden" and a revised version of the English translation by C.T. Druery and William Bateson, "Experiments in Plant Hybridization", MendelWeb is offered as a public sourcebook and collaborative environment compatible with a variety of guided and independent studies. For some background and an early description of the project, you may want to read MendelWeb: An electronic science/math/history resource for the WWW, a short paper prepared for the 2nd International World Wide Web Conference.

You may wish to use MendelWeb as an archive for viewing or downloading different versions and translations of Mendel's paper, or as a source for essays and commentary, bibliography and reference materials. Hopefully you will find ways to make use of the English hypertext as well, with its links to glossaries, notes, discussion questions, exercises, and other sites and documents around the world. There is also the Mendelroom, accessible at either the BioMoo or Diversity University (another non-game Moo), where you can talk with others who are also using MendelWeb; if you've never used a non-game Moo before, or if you would like to know more about Mendelroom, please read the MendelWeb Moo Information page.

Navigating MendelWeb

Because MendelWeb is constructed around primary texts, making your way around is not very complicated. If you keep in mind the meaning of the following buttons, you shouldn't waste too much time hopelessly clicking.

These buttons will always take you to the MendelWeb Table of Contents.

This button, no matter what its size, will always send you to this MendelWeb homepage.

These buttons will always send you to the linked, hypertext versions of Mendel's original paper and its English translation.

These buttons will always take you to the MendelWeb Collaborative Hypertext Homepage. Here you can read and contribute annotations to both English and German versions of Mendel's paper. This is the part of MendelWeb known as The Reader's Mendel.

This button will always link you to a table of contents for both German and English versions of Mendel's paper.

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