A Visit to Mendel's Monastery

A MONUMENTAL task rests in the hands of Professor Jaroslav Krizenecky, newly appointed custodian of the Mendel Museum. Seated at Mendel's beautifully carved black desk in a sunny window in Brno, he is examining, listing, and cataloguing the remaining papers and documents of Gregor Johann Mendel, the founder of the science of genetics. His hopes and plans for a great Mendel Institute for the study of the history and theory of biology have not materialized, but his new work is progressing and plans are being made for a Mendel Centennial in Brno in 1965. We had spent some days in Prague in the summer of 1961. At the Biological Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Drs. Alena Lengerova and Marta Voiti'kova showed us some of their research on mice, ducks, and guinea fowls. We saw other research on beans and lotus. The Institute is in the process of rebuilding and expansion. We also visited Professor Karel Hruby, Chairman of the Department of Genetics at Charles University, and his co-workers. He showed us the proofs of his comprehensive new text book Genetika, published by the Academy of Sciences, in which Mendelian genetics is presented in detail. We also saw some of his collection of miniature moths and his manuscript about them in Czech and Latin. As President of the Botanical Society of Czechoslovakia, he is deep in plans for their Jubilee Congress to be held in July of this year. It was he who telephoned to the University in Brno to make possible our rewarding visit there. Driving east of Prague on Saturday morning through the beautiful August countryside with its lovely hills and valleys, we saw farmers harvesting peas, the crop with which Mendel was familiar from childhood. It seems likely that he had noted the variable characteristics of pea plants as a young person and set up his experiments with them to work out principles governing their transmission. Occasionally, we stopped to take pictures of scenes reminiscent of the harvesting operations on our Canadian prairies some 30 years ago. The ripe grain was in golden stooks, and horse-drawn racks collected the luxurious forage in the fields. In the towns, we passed sandy-colored, plastered houses. Occasionally there was harvesting by hand scythes; hand-drawn carts, oxen, and geese made it seem almost a fairy-tale land.