Mendel was able to cross-breed the plants by transferring pollen with a paintbrush. He meticulously recorded a range of characteristics for each plant, including its height, pod shape, pea shape ...

Keeping the peas. Mendel did not set out to conduct the first well-controlled and brilliantly-designed experiments in genetics. His goal was to create hybrid pea plants and observe the outcome.

Next, Mendel went through his data and examined each characteristic separately. He compared the total numbers of round versus wrinkled and yellow versus green peas, as shown in Tables 1 and 2.