230 Singing Valleys 



provided a means. Father Gregor was no theologian. His ser- 

 mons would not have converted a hungry beggar. It was 

 only in the classroom where he taught that his shyness and 

 ineffectuality left him. There, and in the little garden plot 

 before his house in the cloister, he moved and spoke with 

 authority. Father Gregor had ways the other monks thought 

 decidedly queer, not to say indecent. He had an extraordinary 

 fancy for mice. This was not just a pious tolerance for even 

 the least of God's creatures, such as the blessed Francis would 

 have commended. He actually seemed to care more about, 

 and to give more time to, the contemplation of the gray and 

 white mice he kept in cages as finer souls kept canaries and 

 finches than he gave to his books. The rest of the community 

 did not know how much attention Father Gregor gave to the 

 tiny creatures. Or that he did not lower his eyes modestly 

 before their innocent enjoyment of each other according to 

 the laws of biology. Or much more heinous, that he actually 

 encouraged and assisted at the mating of gray mice with white; 

 breaking the solemn canons that had held since the days of 

 the Jewish patriarchs. 



Nor did Father Gregor confine his studies of sex to the 

 mice in his cell. Shamelessly, in his garden, he married plant 

 and plant, watching jealously over each mating and the birth 

 of the offspring. Working delicately nastily, some of the 

 pious monks might have declared had they understood what 

 it was all about he performed castrations and abortions, 

 played midwife to blossoms and procurer to concupiscent 

 stamens. All in all, Mendel experimented with the sex life of 

 some ten thousand individual plants before he felt prepared 

 to give his theory concerning heredity to the scientific world. 



The tragedy was that the world was so little interested in 

 it. No one, not even the German botanist Carl von Nageli, 

 to whom Mendel timidly sent a copy of his paper, paid any 

 heed. Something in Father Gregor seemed to wilt from that 

 day. "My day will yet come," he said; but there was more 

 futility than ringing hope in his tone. He never lived to see 



