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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
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