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 Koenigen-