24 THE CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION 



Vriesianism becomes obsolete, descending like its predecessors, 

 Lamarckism and Darwinism, into the charnel-house of dis- 

 carded systems whose value is historic, but no longer scien- 

 tific. When we enquire into the reason of this common 

 demise of all the classic systems of transformism, we find 

 it to reside in the progress of the new science of Mendelian 

 genetics, whose foundations were laid by an Augustinian 

 monk of the nineteenth century. Six years after the appear- 

 ance of Darwin's ''Origin of Species," Gregor Johann Mendel 

 published a short paper entitled ''Versuche iiber Pflanzen- 

 hybriden," which, unnoticed at the time by a scientific world 

 preoccupied with Darwinian fantasies, was destined, on its 

 coming to light at the beginning of the present century, to 

 administer the final coup de grace to all the elaborate schemes 

 of evolution that had preceded or followed its initial publica- 

 tion. It took half a century, however, before the dust of Dar- 

 winian sensationalism subsided sufliciently, to permit the "re- 

 discovery" of Mendel's solid and genuine contribution to bio- 

 logical science. But the Pralat of the abbey at Briinn never 

 lived to see the day of his triumph. The true genius of his 

 i century, he died unhonored and unsung, a pretender being 

 ' crowned in his stead. For Coulter says of Darwin: "He died 



^ / April 19, 1882, probably the most honored scientific man in 



) the world." (Evoludm, 1916, p. 35.) 



Within the small dimensions of the paper, of which we 

 have spoken, Mendel had compressed the results of years of 

 carefully conceived and accurately executed experimentation 

 reduced to precise statistical form and interpreted with a pene- 

 trating sagacity of the highest order. It is no exaggeration 

 to say that his discovery has revolutionized the science of 

 biology, giving it, for the first time, mathematical formulas 

 comparable to those of chemistry. His two laws of in- 

 heritance, namely, the law of segregation and the law of in- 

 dependent assortment of characters, have, as previously inti- 

 mated, become the basis of the new science of Genetics. His 

 analysis of biparental reproduction has interpreted for us the 



