ABBOT GREGOR MENDEL 5 



and Japan, as soon as the intended scheme of honour- 

 ing Mendel was made known. 



Mendel's fate as an investigator shaped itself 

 very strangely. We see in him a man who in his 

 thoughts and works in important biological subjects 

 was far in advance of his times, and a noble, modest, 

 retiring personality, who did not in the least try to 

 attain scientific celebrity. So his fate ordained that 

 late, and long after his death, he should be recognised. 

 The great question of heredity he studied by means 

 of producing hybrids in plants. The question had 

 long been raised, especially since Darwin. But the 

 answer to this question had been on the one side 

 crudely empirical, and on the other too largely 

 speculative, so that in reality it was very unsatis- 

 factory and of a very hypothetical character. Mendel 

 took the only right way which could solve the question, 

 for unlike his predecessors he did not experiment in 

 a vague or restricted fashion and try to clear up the 

 tangled events by hypothesis, but he systematically 

 made the simplest trials, interpreting their results by 

 the clearest logic. His observations were based on 

 numbers, and he pervaded all with a mathematical 

 precision. He was dominated by the same spirit as 

 the great Julius Robert Meyer, the discoverer of the 

 law of the Conservation of Energy, who once said : 

 " A single number is of more value than a whole 

 library of hypotheses." 



Mendel had, as I have already said, a mathe- 

 matical head, and I dwell on this again, so as to put 

 Mendel's position as biologist in the right light. It 



