ABSTRACT
On February 1865 several men are walking along the Johannesgasse in Brunn towards the Modern School, a big building, still new. One of these men was Pater Gregor Mendel, a professor at the Modern School, and with his friends he is going to a meeting of the Brunn Society for the Study of Natural Science, where he is to read a paper on Experiments in Plant-Hybridisation. In the clarity of its construction and in the rigid consistency of its logic, Mendel’s monograph certainly contrasts most agreeably with such cloudy phrase-making. But most of those who heard him lecture and who read the monograph when it was printed had been insufficiently prepared, while many of them were not free from prejudice. The basic notion of Darwin’s doctrine was the variability of species, whereas the basic idea of Mendel’s was the constancy, if not of species, at least of their elements, of characters, and of the heredity factors producing these.
