kloster, in Altbruenn. He
was very successful in {202} his theological studies, and in 1846 he
was ordained priest. He seems to have made a striking success as a
teacher, especially of natural history and physics, in the higher
Realschule in Bruenn. He attracted the attention of his superiors, who
were persuaded to give him additional opportunities for the study of
the sciences, particularly of biological science, for which he had a
distinct liking and special talents.

Accordingly, in 1851 he went to Vienna for the purpose of doing
post-graduate work in the natural sciences at the university there.
During the two years he spent at this institution he attracted
attention by his serious application to study, but apparently without
having given any special evidence of the talent for original
observation that was in him. In 1853 he returned to the monastery in
Altbruenn, and at the beginning of the school year became a teacher at
the Realschule in Bruenn. He remained in Bruenn for the rest of his
life, dying at the comparatively early age of sixty-two, in 1884.
During the last sixteen years of his life he held the position of
abbot of the monastery, the duties of which prevented him from
applying himself as he probably would have desired, to the further
investigation of scientific questions.

The experiments on which his great discoveries were founded were
carried out in the garden of the monastery during the sixteen years
from 1853 to 1868. How serious was his scientific devotion may be
gathered from the fact that in {203} establishing the law which now
bears his name, and which was founded on observations on peas, some
10,000 plants were carefully examined, their various peculiarities
noted, their ancestry carefully traced, the seeds kept in definite
order and entirely separate, so as to be used for the study of certain
qualities in their descendants, and the whole scheme of
experimentation planned with such detail that for the first time in
the history of studies in heredity, no extraneous and inexplicable
data were allowed to enter the problem. Besides his work on plants,
Mendel occupied himself with other observations of a scientific
character on two subjects which were at that time attracting
considerable attention. These were the state and condition of the
ground-water--a subject which was thought to stand at the basis of
hygienic principles at the time and which had occupied the attention
of the distinguished Pr