Sensing that the small group of members was growing hostile, the school teacher from Heinzendorf tried to rescue his friend, "Brother Gregory, do you remember the work we did together with Father Schreiber using fruit trees? We often seemed to find hybrids that never looked like the parent plants. Didn't you find any pea plants that were a mixture of your characteristics?"
Mendel blinked. "Ahh," he said, and looked directly at Herr Makytta, "a good question, and vital to my thesis. All the characters which were investigated in these experiments. The angular wrinkled form of the seed, the green color of the albumen, the white color of the seed-coats ..." He went on to list all the various pea characteristics that he had investigated, concluding, "... and the dwarfed stem, all reappear in the numerical proportion I have given here, without any essential alteration." Then the important statement, "Transitional forms were not observed in any experiment." He made the point forcefully. It had been a critical discovery that characters did not 'blend' into one another like pots of paint.
All the naturalists in the room, at least those familiar with Diebl and Unger's work, were aware of the debate about inheritance. One school of thought was that children inherited a 'fluid' (and some thought this fluid came exclusively from the father) in which there was a blend of characters such as the distinctive Habsburg nose, or Mendel's seed shape. This 'blend' determined the appearance of the offspring. If they had been listening that evening, they would have heard Mendel put the nail in that coffin. Characters do not blend during the inheritance process. Mendel had shown that characters such as the color of seed-coats are transmitted intact from parent to child, generation after generation. It was an important discovery.