470 THE BIOCOSMOS HISTORICAL. 



response from the scientific world, which was 

 then digesting Darwin's book. Mendel, a con- 

 temporary of Darwin, enunciated a doctrine, 

 which was to find its place not only after Dar- 

 win, but after the two chief post-Darwinians, 

 Weismann and De Vries. It was mainly the 

 latter who about the year 1900 re-discovered 

 and resurrected Mendel's work, which is in 

 general complementary to his own. At the 

 present time the Mendelian movement would 

 seem to be uppermost in biology, and has 

 called forth or at least confirmed a new de- 

 partment of it, or a new science perchance, 

 which now goes under the name of Genetics, 

 So it conies that an Austrian monk, a celibate, 

 has given to science the epoch-making idea 

 of generation, to which by his vow he might 

 be supposed to be unfriendly. Also he was 

 ahead of his time which had to evolve up to 

 him before he could be appreciated. 



Accordingly in the succession after Darwin 

 we put together three leading names Weis- 

 mann^ De Vries, Mendel. They all contributed 

 to explain the genesis of the living individual. 

 Each of them in his own way dealt with that 

 persistent germ-cell which has the power of 

 continuing itself in a line of transitory indi- 

 vidual shapes through time. Thus in the or- 

 ganism there is suggested an immortal and a 

 mortal part. Germinal continuity, in its full 



