Inherited traits are passed as separate units, not blended, following fixed ratios.
Mendel grew thousands of pea plants and patiently counted how many had white flowers versus purple ones. He found traits never blend halfway but appear in fixed ratios, like three to one. These separate instructions are what we now call genes, passed unchanged from parent to child.
Mendel showed that each plant carries two copies of every instruction, one from each parent. If a pea gets the instruction for violet color from one parent and white from the other, only violet shows. White stays hidden, but does not disappear. In the next generation, when two plants with one hidden copy cross, one in four peas will have white flowers. This pattern explains why brown eyes can skip a generation.
Why it matters His painstaking work laid the foundation of modern genetics, though it was ignored for decades.