de Vries, Hugo Marie

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de Vries, Hugo Marie (1848–1935) Dutch botanist, who became professor of botany at Amsterdam in 1878. He was the first to recognize the importance of genetic mutations in the evolution of living organisms. To investigate his theories of hereditary traits in plants, he began a series of plant breeding experiments in 1892. Within four years he had obtained evidence for the segregation of characters in the offspring of crosses only to discover that Mendel had published similar results 34 years earlier, which had been ignored.