Mendel and the Laws of Life
Walsh, James J.
MENDEL AND THE LAWS OF LIFE By JAMES J. WALSH THE name most frequently mentioned in the scientific journals of the first quarter of the twentieth century is that of Abbot Mendel. He made the...
...This natural desire, however, is changed after a time into a supernatural motive to devote one's life to the service of the Almighty, or else the applicant usually does not finish his noviceship but is told that his place is elsewhere...
...Some time after this, he tried the examination for the regular teacher's certificate once more, and again failed...
...His fellow members of the society believed in him, and elected him president...
...The family supplied the rest of the foodstuffs necessary to support him, sent in express packages by the weekly freight wagon that traveled that way...
...The results of it remained utterly neglected until the twentieth century was opening...
...Accordingly, Mendel made application to the Augustinians and was received as a novice...
...This is the man who worked on patiently in his little monastery garden, made more than 10,000 observations on pea plants, evolved a series of laws of heredity, read his paper before the Naturalists' Society of the little town of Brunn, and was perfectly confident that he had made a great discovery...
...We have all known of men whose scientific investigations were of great significance being called to take up administrative positions in which their opportunities for research became limited or disappeared entirely...
...However, this hope proved a vain one...
...His position as abbot, however, led to the careful preservation of many traditions regarding him, and these have now been gathered up by a teacher in Brunn, Moravia, where most of Mendel's life was passed, and at last we have a definitive story of his life...
...Mendel was sent to join them...
...The country was called "the little cow country"— Kuhlaendchen in German—probably because of its suitability for dairy farming...
...All his life, Mendel recalled the pleasure he had enjoyed in improving the quality of fruit by crossing and grafting...
...His great accomplishments lay utterly unrecognized for almost a generation...
...or that the first workers in the field at the beginning of the century, who rediscovered Mendel's achievements, had any idea of...
...In his ancestry, there was probably a mixture of German and Slav, so Mendel represented what his own laws of heredity first emphasized—not a halving, but a combination of the best unit qualities of these two races...
...When Mendel was sixteen, his father could no longer help him, because of an injury he had received from a falling tree, and the future scientist had to shift for himself as best he could...
...As he himself was the man who was to point out one of the greatest defects in the Darwinian theory by his discoveries which showed the laws and process of heredity, this remark is of very special interest...
...The superior had inquired of his teacher if there were any clever students who might be suitable for community life, and young Mendel had been recommended as a very promising scholar...
...Though he could not pass the examinations, he became a really great teacher...
...and this proved a great grief to Mendel, for he had a very tender heart and a deep affection for his family...
...It was under very similar circumstances that Pasteur, about the same time in France, received his education...
...When two of his friends went off to the Piarist gymnasium, some twenty kilometers away, and returned to tell young Mendel of their experiences, he pleaded to be allowed to continue his studies, and his mother, to whom Mendel felt that he owed most of his best qualities, added her plea...
...All the rest of his life Mendel remained a substitute teacher, or as they call it in German, a "supplent...
...One of his sisters offered to sacrifice whatever share might be coming to her as a dowry in order that her brother might have his education...
...He tried to pass the examination as regular professor at the Brunn Technical School, but failed in it...
...That would be about fifty cents in our money—but money then was worth, in buying power, about three times as much as it is today...
...There are still living a number of men who studied under him and they are all enthusiastic about the way he caught their attention, aroused their initiative, and inspired them with an incentive to work...
...He made the work objective as far as possible, and he was always ready to listen to difficulties and to explain them...
...He was ambitious, and his mother and sisters encouraged him, so he went for higher studies to Olmiitz...
...Doubtless the writer does not know that many of those who enter religious life have a natural attraction for it because of the opportunity it affords for intellectual development...
...He used to take them round to the cloister with him and show them his garden where he was making the experiments on pea plants that were to revolutionize modern biology...
...As abbot, he was noted for his charity, his care for poor students, his readiness to sit on boards of directors of organizations that would help men to help themselves, and for his constant, gentle friendliness...
...He was born of poor parents on a farm near the little town of Heintzendorf, in northeast Moravia, just where, according to present geographical boundaries, Germany, Poland, and Czecho-Slovakia meet...
...Sisterly sacrifices afforded the opportunities for the two greatest scientists of the nineteenth century to obtain that training of mind which enabled them to achieve their great success...
...From very early years he had to work with his father in the fields, and it was here that his appreciation of nature awoke...
...Mendel loved animals, and cruelty to them was the one thing that aroused him almost to anger...
...This was what happened to Mendel...
...He knew that his paper in the transactions of the Naturalists' Society found its way to every important university, and he himself was in close correspondence with Professor Naegeli, one of the most distinguished of the investigating biologists of that day...
...His biographer, who is evidently not a Catholic, is inclined to think that the only reason that Mendel entered the Augustinians was in order to secure an education...
...It was a life position which took him away from his teaching and his scientific research, though for some time he continued his work on plants and his observations in meteorology...
...Even with this sacrifice, however, the family could not pay the full price for Mendel at boarding school, and he was taken as a "halb-kost," or "halfboard," scholar...
...In spite of their poverty, his parents made sacrifices to give him an education...
...Mendel's work was done in a little monastery garden about the size of two city backyards in such a crowded centre as New York City...
...Faculty and students soon realized this fact...
...He did not hesitate to say that he thought there was something lacking in the theory of natural selection...
...Mendel's laws of heredity have proved to possess a much wider application than probably even he ever dreamed of...
...Mendel himself worked whenever opportunity afforded, and during the summer he labored hard in order to enable his parents to continue his allowance for schooling...
...His father died as a result of the injury, though only after a prolonged illness...
...The life of such a man has a deep appeal for human nature, but it has been very difficult up to the present to get details of his career...
...He talked plant-crossing and breeding with them very familiarly, and used to illustrate his teaching by anecdotes and indulge very little in theory...
...This is the man who made the greatest scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century—discoveries which are now preoccupying the scientists of the twentieth century more than any other...
...He left word to divide his last month's salary among the three poorest of the students...
...He felt sure that a time would come when his work would be recognized...
...After his ordination to the priesthood, his superior, finding that his delicacy of feeling made him unsuitable for ordinary parochial and religious duties, gave him special opportunities for the study of science...
...After his election, he did not bid his scholars goodbye, because such partings affected him too deeply...
...but since then it has been the basis of more successful investigation in biology than w£s done in that science through all the centuries before our time...
...He spent two years at the University of Vienna, and his scholarship benefited greatly...
...He made the first great step into that all important territory of the unknown in biology—heredity...
...There seems to have been an extraordinarily intimate personal relationship between Mendel and his students...
...Under these circumstances, the Augustinian monastery in the little town of Brunn, in Moravia, came to his assistance...
...His memory was not well developed and he had no large background of detailed information...
...Life was much simpler for Mendel after his entrance into the Augustinian order...
...Just when Mendel's work was completed to a point where it could constitute the basis for future investigators, he was elected the abbot of his monastery...
...Between the hard work and the very scanty diet 520 THE COMMONWEAL March 17, 1926 that he could afford, Mendel broke down and it seemed as though he would have to give up his studies...
...As a substitute teacher, he had received about a florin a day...
...More than a generation later, Bateson, the president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, did not hesitate to say that if Darwin had known of Mendel's work, it would have greatly changed the aspect of many of the scientist's problems, and would surely have modified many of the opinions Darwin himself expressed...
...He was deeply interested in science, and his biographer relates how he bought Darwin's books as they were issued...
...He accepted his new duties as a task to be accomplished to the best of his ability, and he hoped that he might be able to secure time for further research in science...
...His brother members of the Augustinian order came to think much of his kindness of heart and the fact that he made so many friends and no enemies...
...They elected him the prelatus, or abbot, of the monastery...
Vol. 3 • March 1926 • No. 19
