Gregor Mendel proposed the laws of inheritance after studying pea plants in the 1860s.
Mendel conducted thousands of controlled crosses at the Augustinian monastery in Brno, using traits such as seed color, seed shape, and flower color. He counted the resulting plants rather than relying only on descriptions, allowing him to identify consistent numerical patterns.
His 1866 paper introduced ideas now associated with segregation and independent assortment. Mendel’s work was largely overlooked until around 1900, when Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns, and Erich von Tschermak independently recognized its importance.
Mendel did not use the modern terms gene, allele, or chromosome. Those concepts were developed later, but his experimental results became a foundation of classical genetics.