Thanks to his experiments on pea plants, first published in 1866, Gregor Mendel is routinely hailed as the founding father of modern genetics. But was it really his intention to uncover the laws of heredity and the particulate nature of the gene – or have these motivations been retrospectively ascribed to him in the light of present-day knowledge? Such questions have been the subject of a long standing debate amongst historians of science, central to which has been the translation of Mendel's original paper into English. Accompanied by an extensive commentary, this new translation, published by the Mendel Museum and supported by the British Society for the History of Science, hopes to bring valuable and important new insights to the ongoing task of understanding Mendel.