JOHANN MENDEL 323 



which small minds are accustomed to enclose the fragments 

 of the achievements of great men, fragments which cor- 

 respond to their own mental capacity. These investigators 

 will have to go their own way in an entirely independent 

 manner, led by their direct knowledge of facts. 



Johann Mendel was born in a little village in what at that 

 time was called Mahren, on the Silesian frontier, as the son 

 of simple peasants. He was to take over the small piece of 

 land owned by his father; but the familiarity he had gained 

 with the life of plants awakened in the boy a desire for scien- 

 tific study, which the parents only yielded to reluctantly, and 

 were only able to fulfil by great self-sacrifice. The director 

 of the Gymnasium, which Mendel was then allowed to 

 attend, was an Augustinian priest; he no doubt led Mendel 

 likewise to take the life of a monk, which allows of so much 

 leisure for scientific activity, and mental retirement. At 

 twenty-one years of age he was received into the Augustinian 

 priory in Briinn, under the name of Gregor, after having 

 finished his theological studies. He now had the possi- 

 bility of studying botany, physics and chemistry at the 

 university of Vienna, where Doppler was also one of his 

 teachers. In the examination for teachers he failed, ob- 

 viously on account of too great freedom of mind; but he was 

 nevertheless able to act from the year 1854 onwards for 

 fourteen years as an excellent teacher of natural history and 

 physics at the school in Briinn. In these years also his most 

 important experiments in breeding were performed, mostly 

 on peas and beans, for which purpose the monastery garden 

 was available. In 1868 he became abbot of his monastery; 

 the duties thus undertaken, which he, like Copernicus in a 

 similar case, fulfilled most faithfully under very difficult 

 circumstances, made a premature end of his scientific in- 

 vestigation. He died in 1884, at the age of sixty-two.^ The 



^A detailed biography of Mendel has been written by Dr. Hugo litis 

 (Berlin, 1924). 



