In 1865 the monk, Gregor Mendel, had read a paper to the Brunn Society a paper which was published in 1866, in which he expounded his Laws of Inheritance, and illustrated them by his experiments on peas. His attention was not directed to the plant as a whole, but to individual characters, color, shape of seed, etc. He had found two distinct groups of characters which he named Dominant and Recessive. He had discovered the existence of what were later to be called "genes".