MENDEL AND HIS LAW 



SAMUEL CHRISTIAN SCHMUCKER 



Delivered November 14, 1916 



ON THE railway which leads from Vienna to Prague, and a little less than 

 a hundred miles from Vienna, is the very ancient city of Briinn. To- 

 day it is busy with the spindles of the mills which make it the great city 

 of the woolen industry in Austria and the chief manufacturing center of that 

 country. The various wars of Europe have swept over it and swung it from 

 side to side. When the revolt of the Carbonari broke out in Italy and the 

 Italian revolutionary poet, Silvio Pellico, was arrested for his part in the revolt, 

 he was taken to Briinn. In the subterranean chambers of the prison that 

 rests upon the Spielberg, to one side of the city, Pellico passed the years made 

 so famous in Uterature by his pathetic story. The first year of Pellico's im- 

 prisonment, the year 1822, saw the birth of a peasant boy in the neighborhood 

 of Briinn. Educated for the priesthood, he became a monk in the monastery 

 in this beautiful city between the rivers, and here did a piece of work for which 

 he has since been famed throughout the scientific world. 



The world can hold only one big idea at a time, and when Gregor Johann 

 Mendel (the first name, "shepherd," was assumed when he entered the 

 Augustinian order) arrived at his conclusions, the fame of Darwin's theory 

 and his epoch-making work were stirring the scientific world. The battle 

 over the species question was so bitter and so vigorous that no one seems to 

 have had time to notice the Austrian monk counting out his peas in the little 

 cloister of his garden. The world was not yet ready for Mendel's law of 

 heredity, and it lay buried until the year 1900. By this time all the biologic 

 world was studying the problems of inheritance, and three different workers, 

 all acting independently, came separately to a discovery of the obscure pub- 

 lication of this modest monk. Hugo De Vries, the Dutch botanist of the 

 University of Amsterdam, working over the primroses which had spontaneously 

 sprung up in the University botanical garden, became deeply interested in the 

 study of inheritance; his scholarly search for all sorts of published matter 

 bearing on the question led him to the archives of the Society of Naturalists 

 in Briinn. Looking over the back numbers of this pubHcation, he found Men- 



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