59° THE HISTORY OF BIOLOGY 



JoHANN Mendel was born in i8iz of peasant parents at Heinzendorf, 

 a German colony in the midst of the Slav population of Austrian Silesia. 

 Having shown remarkable intelligence at an early age, he was sent to a 

 grammar-school, and, probably with a view to obtaining better opportun- 

 ities for devoting himself to study, he entered an Augustine monastery at 

 Briinn in the district of Moravia. As a monk he adopted, after the Catholic 

 custom, a new Christian name, Gregor, by which he became known to 

 posterity. He was sent at the expense of the monastery to Vienna, where 

 he studied for three years, devoting himself especially to mathematics and 

 natural science; upon returning home he became a schoolmaster and in his 

 leisure hours cultivated plants in the cloister garden for scientific purposes. 

 He published the account of his results in the little-known "treatises" that 

 were brought out by the natural-science society at Briinn. In 1868 he was 

 appointed head of the monastery, or prelate, as it was called. This appoint- 

 ment, however, actually proved his undoing. Four years later the then liberal 

 parliament in Austria sought to reduce the country's financial distress by, 

 inter alia, taxing the monasteries. The monks, like all the reactionary parties 

 in general in the country, considered that the tax menaced the monasteries' 

 ancient privileges and set themselves up in opposition to it. Eventually, 

 however, the measure was carried through in several instances, but the one 

 who refused to give in was Mendel; for twelve years he held out, defying 

 penalties and warrants of distraint, but finally he broke down completely 

 under the struggle, contracting a sickness that resulted in his death in 1884. 

 Thus fell one of the pioneers of modern biology as a champion of Catholic 

 clericalism — in its way an irony of fate. 



Alendel's experiments with peas 

 Mendel's fame, which was late in coming, rests simply and solely upon 

 two short essays in the above-mentioned journal. They are, however, the 

 fruit of many years' work and testify to a keen observation of nature and 

 a thorough grounding in mathematical thought, which do not often go 

 together; Darwin, for instance, had a genius for observation, but the sum- 

 mary accounts of his observations are vague and obscure; Gal ton was a 

 mathematician, but he worked mostly upon material obtained second-hand 

 as the result of inquiry, so that it was not truly accurate. Mendel applied 

 himself to the study of the phenomena of heredity in garden plants; he se- 

 lected, to start with, certain easily observable characters — the colour of 

 the flowers, the shape of the seeds, the structure of the position of the blooms 

 — and he studied their modifications in different generations. He crossed peas 

 with white and red flowers; the hybrids then proved to be red throughout; 

 when, again, these hybrids were allowed to fertilize themselves, the succeed- 

 ing generations turned out to be coloured in a peculiar way: for every three 

 red individuals there was one white. These white, if self-fertilized, invariably 

 produced white offspring, one-third of the red remained similarly con- 



