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.

As we begin the twentieth century, the most interesting question in
biology is undoubtedly that of heredity. Just at the dawn of the
century three distinguished scientists, working in different
countries, rediscovered a law with regard to heredity which promises
to be even more important for the science of biology in the twentieth
century than was Lamarck's work for the nineteenth century. This law,
which, it is thought, will do more to simplify the problems of
heredity than all the observations and theories of nineteenth-century
workers, and which has already done much more to point out the methods
by which observation, and the lines along which experimentation shall
be best directed so as to replace elaborate but untrustworthy
scientific theorizing by definite knowledge, was discovered by a
member of a small religious community in the little-known town of
Bruenn, in Austria, some thirty-five years before the beginning of the
present century.

Considering how generally, in English-speaking countries at least, it
is supposed that the training of a clergyman and particularly that of
a religious unfits him for any such initiative in science, Father
Mendel's discovery comes with all the more emphatic surprise. There is
no doubt, however, in the minds of many of the most prominent
present-day workers in biology that his {197} discoveries are of a
ground-breaking character that will furnish substantial foundation for
a new development of scientific knowledge with regard to heredity.

Lest it should be thought that perhaps there is a tendency to make
Father Mendel's discovery appear more important here than it really
is, because of his station in life, it seems desirable to quote some
recent authoritative expressions of opinion with regard to the value
of his observations and the importance of the law he enunciated, as
well as the principle which he considered to be the explanation of
that law.

In the February number of _Harper's Monthly_ for 1903, Professor
Thomas Hunt Morgan, Prof