THEORY OF HEREDITY 107 



returned to his Abbey, where he passed the re- 

 mainder of his life, during the last sixteen years 

 of which he held the position of abbot. No doubt 

 he made an excellent head of the Abbey, but the 

 labours thus cast upon him must have seriously 

 interfered with his scientific studies, most, if not 

 all, of which date from an earlier period. He died 

 in 1884, at the age of sixty-two, and left behind 

 him the still remembered recollection of one who, 

 in addition to his great scientific merits, was pos- 

 sessed of a truly lovable personal character. 

 Darwin died in 1882, so that the two workers 

 were contemporaries ; but it does not appear that 

 the great Englishman ever heard of his Continental 

 colleague, whose work, according to no less an 

 authority than Professor T. H. Morgan, was des- 

 tined to give the final coup de grace to the doctrine 

 of natural selection. Mendel's discovery was pub- 

 lished in 1866 in the Transactions of the Briinn 

 Natural History Society, and for thirty-three 

 years it lay apparently still-born. But in 

 1899 three workers, de Vries in Holland, Correns 

 in Germany and Tschermak in Austria, re-dis- 

 covered the facts which Mendel had first brought 

 to light ; his paper was resuscitated, and the 

 discoverer a circumstance not of invariable 

 occurrence came into the reward of his labours. 

 In this country Bateson of Cambridge has been 

 most active in sustaining Mendel's hypothesis ; 

 and he, Miss Saunders and Messrs. Lock, Punnett 

 and Hurst have published numerous papers bear- 

 ing on it under the aegis of the Royal Society and 

 elsewhere. 



