MENDELTSM 61 



that, just at the time when Darwin's pen was shaking 

 the world, another quiet worker was attacking the 

 root question in Austria. The pacific Darwin had at 

 least one champion who was a master of polemics, 

 and his work was soon noised abroad. But the Abb6 

 Gregor Mendel had no Huxley ; and there was noth- 

 ing particularly sensational about his leisurely but 

 scrupulously honest and scientiHc observations on 

 the mating of different kinds of peas. Dogmatic 

 systems did not worry, themselves about peas, and 

 Mendel did not " stagger humanity " with any asser- 

 tions as to the origin of our kind. Hence it was that 

 for just thirty years — and these, as I have said, years 

 violently agitated about the very questions which 

 Mendel had helped to solve — scarcely any one had 

 heard of his name or his work. Finally, Professor 

 Hugo de Vries, the distinguished botanist of Amster- 

 dam, rediscovered it. He set to work to verify and 

 amplify the Abbe's all-but-forgotten experiments, 

 which had been published in 1865. In this country 

 he gained an ally in Mr. Bateson of Cambridge, and 

 now Mendelism is perhaps the most bruited subject 

 in the whole realm of biology. It is now beginning 

 to appear that the Abbe's leisure hours served in 

 great measure to elucidate the causes of variation 

 and the laws of its occurrence. He has taught us 

 that, as we noted in the first pages of this book, 

 variations are not a sort of "fluke," nor the results 

 of incompetence on the part of the " force " called 

 heredity: but that certain variations are themselves 

 the expression of a form of heredity, ultimately sub- 

 ject to the same laws and dependent on the sumo 

 sequence of events. It is interesting to speculate 



