The Journal of Genetics completed a hundred years this November, having thereby lived through and par-ticipated in recording a century in which genetics in its various avatars fundamentally transformed biology. Preceded only by the Zeitschrift für inductive Abstammungs und Vererbungslehre (now Molecular Genetics and Genomics) founded by Erwin Baur in Germany, the Journal of Heredity in the USA, focussing largely on breeding, and the very short-lived Mendel Journal in England, the Journal of Genetics has stayed true to the early roots of the ?eld, retaining its founding focus on both genetics and evolution. William Bateson, the senior of the founding pair of Bateson and Punnett, was drawn to genetics primarily through his interest in phenotypic variation, its causes and the role it played in evolution, especially in the origin of new species. The subsequent stewardship of the journal by J. B. S. Haldane from 1945 to 1964 further strengthened the journal's evolutionary orientation during a period in which the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis was formalized and the theoretical advances in evolutionary genetics of the previous decades began to inspire critical em-pirical work into the detailed functioning of the microevolutionary process. Over the period since 1985, when it was revived under the auspices of the Indian Academy of Sciences, the journal has maintained its basic orientation while also keeping up with the rapidly diversifying ?eld of genetics and its myriad appli-cations. The journal has also managed to survive three bad periods: a ?nancial crunch in the 1920s when printing costs suddenly rose after World War I, a seven and a half year lapse in publication after Helen Spurway's death, and a lean patch with respect to submissions in the late 1990s. Today, as the relatively new ?eld of evo-devo—itself made possible by the tremendous advances in genetics over the past one hundred years—refocusses attention on the key question of the genesis and nature of phenotypic variation underlying speciational events, we hope that the Journal of Genetics will be one of the places where such research is published. Bateson undoubtedly would have wished it so!
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