Professor Bateson, whose book on Mendel's "Principles of Heredity" is the best popular exposition in English of Mendel's work, says that an exact determination of the laws of heredity will probably produce more change in man's outlook upon the world and in his power over nature than any other advance in natural knowledge that can be clearly foreseen. No one has better opportunities of pursuing such work than horticulturists and stockbreeders. They are daily witnesses of the phenomena of heredity. Their success also depends largely on a knowledge of its laws, and obviously every increase in that knowledge is of direct and special importance to them.
After thus insisting on the theoretic and practical importance of the subject, Professor Bateson says:--
As regards the Mendelian principles which it is the chief aim of this introduction to present clearly before the reader, it may be said that by the [{200}] application of those principles we are enabled to reach and deal in a comprehensive manner with phenomena of a fundamental nature, lying at the very root of all conceptions not merely of the physiology of reproduction and heredity, but even of the essential nature of living organisms; and I think that I use no extravagant words when, in introducing Mendel's work to the notice of the Royal Horticultural Society's Journal, I ventured to declare that his experiments are worthy to rank with those which laid the foundation of the atomic laws of chemistry.
Professor L. H. Bailey, who is the Director of the Horticultural Department at Cornell University and the editor of the authoritative Encyclopedia of Horticulture, was one of the first of recent scientists to call attention to Mendel's work. It was, we believe, because of a reference to Mendel's papers by Bailey that Professor de Vries was put on the track of Mendel's discoveries and found that the Austrian monk had completely anticipated the work at which he was then engaged. In a recent issue of The Independent, of New York, Professor Bailey said:--
The teaching of Mendel strikes at the root of two or three difficult and vital problems. It presents a new conception of the proximate mechanism of heredity. The hypothesis of heredity that it suggests will focus our attention along new lines, and will, I believe, arouse as much discussion as Weissmann's hypothesis, and it is probable that it will have a wider influence. Whether it expresses the actual means of heredity or not, it is yet much too early to say. But the hypothesis (which Father Mendel evolved in order to explain the reasons for his law as he saw them) is even a [{201}] greater contribution to science than the so-called Mendel's Law as to the numerical results of hybridization. In the general discussion of evolution Mendel's work will be of the greatest value because it introduces a new point of view, challenges old ideas and opinions, gives us a new theory for discussion, emphasizes the great importance of actual experiments for the solution of many questions of evolution, and then forces the necessity for giving greater attention to the real characters and attributes of plants and animals than to the vague groups that we are in the habit of calling species.
It is very evident that a man of whose work so many authorities are agreed that it is the beginning of a new era in biology, and especially in that most interesting of all questions, heredity, must be worthy of close acquaintance. Hence the present sketch of his career and personality, as far as they are ascertainable, for his modesty, and the failure of the world to recognize his worth in his lifetime, have unfortunately deprived us of many details that would have been precious.
Gregor Johann Mendel was born 27 July, 1822, at Heinzendorf, nor far from Odrau, in Austrian Silesia. He was the son of a well-to-do peasant farmer, who gave him every opportunity of getting a good education when he was young. He was educated at Olmutz, in Moravia, and after graduating from the college there, at the age of twenty-one, he entered as a novice the Augustinian Order, beginning his novitiate in 1843 in the Augustinian monastery Königen-kloster, in Altbrünn. He was very successful in [{202}] his theological studies, and in 1846 he was ordained priest. He seems to have made a striking success as a teacher, especially of natural history and physics, in the higher Realschule in Brünn. He attracted the attention of his superiors, who were persuaded to give him additional opportunities for the study of the sciences, particularly of biological science, for which he had a distinct liking and special talents.
Accordingly, in 1851 he went to Vienna for the purpose of doing post-graduate work in the natural sciences at the university there. During the two years he spent at this institution he attracted attention by his serious application to study, but apparently without having given any special evidence of the talent for original observation that was in him. In 1853 he returned to the monastery in Altbrünn, and at the beginning of the school year became a teacher at the Realschule in Brünn. He remained in Brünn for the rest of his life, dying at the comparatively early age of sixty-two, in 1884. During the last sixteen years of his life he held the position of abbot of the monastery, the duties of which prevented him from applying himself as he probably would have desired, to the further investigation of scientific questions.
The experiments on which his great discoveries were founded were carried out in the garden of the monastery during the sixteen years from 1853 to 1868. How serious was his scientific devotion may be gathered from the fact that in [{203}] establishing the law which now bears his name, and which was founded on observations on peas, some 10,000 plants were carefully examined, their various peculiarities noted, their ancestry carefully traced, the seeds kept in definite order and entirely separate, so as to be used for the study of certain qualities in their descendants, and the whole scheme of experimentation planned with such detail that for the first time in the history of studies in heredity, no extraneous and inexplicable data were allowed to enter the problem. Besides his work on plants, Mendel occupied himself with other observations of a scientific character on two subjects which were at that time attracting considerable attention. These were the state and condition of the ground-water--a subject which was thought to stand at the basis of hygienic principles at the time and which had occupied the attention of the distinguished Professor Pettenkofer and the Munich School of Hygiene for many years--and weather observations. At that time Pettenkofer, the most widely known of sanitary scientists, thought that he was able to show that the curve of frequency of typhoid fever in the different seasons of the year depended upon the closeness with which the ground-water came to the surface. Authorities in hygiene generally do not now accept this supposed law, for other factors have been found which are so much more important that, if the ground-water has any influence, it can be neglected. Mendel's observations in the matter [{204}] were, however, in line with the scientific ideas of the time and undoubtedly must be considered of value.
The other subject in which Mendel interested himself was meteorology. He published in the journal of the Brünn Society of Naturalists a series of statistical observations with regard to the weather. Besides this he organized in connexion with the Realschule in Brünn a series of observation stations in different parts of the country around; and at the time when most scientists considered meteorological problems to be too complex for hopeful solution, Mendel seems to have realized that the questions involved depended rather on the collation of a sufficient number of observations and the deduction of definite laws from them than on any theoretic principles of a supposed science of the weather.