VIII.
ABBOT MENDEL: A NEW OUTLOOK IN HEREDITY.
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, while this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity from so simple a beginning, endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, have been and are being evolved.-- Closing sentence of DARWIN'S Origin of Species.
GREGOR MENDEL
VIII.
ABBOT MENDEL: A NEW, OUTLOOK IN HEREDITY.
[Footnote 14: The portrait of Abbot Mendel which precedes this sketch was kindly furnished by the Vicar of the Augustinian Monastery of Brünn. It represents him holding a fuchsia, his favorite flower, and was taken in 1867, just as he was completing the researches which were a generation later to make his name so famous. The portrait has for this reason a very special interest as a human document. We may add that the sketch of Abbot Mendel which appears here was read by the Very Rev. Klemens Janetschek, the Vicar of the Monastery, who suggested one slight change in it, so that it may be said to have had the revision of one who knew him and his environment very well.]
Scientific progress does not run in cycles of centuries, and as a rule it bears no relationship to the conventional arrangement of years. As has been well said--for science a new century begins every second. There are interesting coincidences, however, of epoch-making discoveries in science corresponding with the beginning of definite eras in time that are at least impressive from a mnemonic standpoint, if from no other.
The very eve of the nineteenth century saw the first definite formulation of the theory of evolution. Lamarck, the distinguished French biologist, stated a theory of development in nature which, although it attracted very little attention [{196}] for many years after its publication, has come in our day to be recognized as the most suggestive advance in biology in modern times.