314 Biographical Notice 



The types of the great discoverers are most various. 

 To the naturalist the fact is full of meaning. The wild, 

 uncertain, rapid flash of genius, the scattered, half-focussed 

 daylight of generalisation, the steady, slowly-perfected ray 

 of penetrative analysis, are all lights in which truth may be 

 seen. Mendel's faculty was of the latter order. From the 

 fragmentary evidence before us we can in all probability 

 form a fairly true notion of the man, with his clear head, 

 strong interest in practical affairs, obstinate determination, 

 and power of pursuing an abstract idea. 



The total neglect of his work is known to have been a 

 serious disappointment to him, as well it might. He is 

 reported to have had confidence that sooner or later it would 

 be noticed, and to have been in the habit of saying " Meine 

 Zeit wird schon kommen ! " This episode in the history of 

 science is not a very pleasant one to contemplate. There 

 are of course many similar examples, but there must be few 

 in which the discovery so long neglected was at once so 

 significant, so simple, and withal so easy to verify. The 

 scientific world may comfort itself with the thought that 

 in this case it sinned through inadvertence. With the ex- 

 ception of Nageli* perhaps none of the leading naturalists 

 ever saw the paper on peas. We would like to know 

 whether Mendel made any other attempt to interest his 

 contemporaries in his discovery. Probably having tried 

 Nageli and failed, he gave up further efforts. 



So far as I have discovered there was, up to 1900, only 

 one reference to Mendel's observations in scientific litera- 

 ture t, namely that of Focke, Pflanzenmischlinge, 1881, 

 p. 109, where it is simply stated that Mendel's numerous 

 experiments on Pisum gave results similar to those obtained 

 by Knight, but that he believed he had found constant 

 numerical ratios among the types produced by hybridisation. 

 In the same work a similar brief reference is made to the 

 paper on Hieracium. For these references we may now 

 be grateful since it was through them that the papers were 

 rediscovered. 



The fact that the Briinn journal is rather scarce does 



* See p. 54. 



t The Hieracium paper is referred to by Peter, Engler's hot. Jahrb. 

 Bde. v and vi, 1884, but only in its systematic bearings. 



