HEREDITY AND "ARRANGEMENT' 135 



once be said that we do now know a good deal 

 about the laws under which inheritance works 

 itself out, and that knowledge, as most people are 

 now aware, is due to the quiet and for a time 

 forgotten labours of Johann Gregor Mendel, 

 once Abbot of the Augustinian Abbey of Bninn, 

 a prelate of that Church which loud-voiced ignora- 

 muses are never tired of proclaiming to have been 

 from the beginning even down to the present 

 day the impassioned and deadly enemy of all 

 scientific progress. Mendel saw that former 

 workers at inheritance had been directing their 

 attention to the tout ensemble of an individual or 

 natural object ; his idea was analytical in its 

 nature, for he directed his attention to individual 

 characteristics, such as stature or colour, or the 

 like. And having thus directed his attention 

 and confined his labours mainly to plants, since 

 the study of generations of most animals is too 

 lengthy a process for one man to carry out, he did 

 in fact discover that there are very definite laws, 

 capable even of numerical statement, under 

 which inheritance acts. There is no need to 

 explain or discuss them here : suffice it to say 

 that there are such laws, 1 as is now admitted by 

 an overwhelming majority of the biologists of 

 to-day. Mendel's facts were hidden in a some- 

 what obscure journal ; they lay dormant, much 

 to his annoyance, during his lifetime. Years 

 after his death his papers were unearthed, and his 



1 An account of them will be found in A Century of Scientific 

 Thought, by the present writer, published by Messrs. Burns & 

 Qates, 



