Footnotes
These detailed footnotes are meant to enlarge upon the abbreviated notes now appearing on pages 266-277 of The Monk in the Garden.
PROLOGUE | CHAPTER 1 | CHAPTER 2 | CHAPTER 3 | CHAPTER 4 | CHAPTER 5 | CHAPTER 6 | CHAPTER 7 | CHAPTER 8 | CHAPTER 9 | CHAPTER 10 | CHAPTER 11 | CHAPTER 12 | CHAPTER 13 | CHAPTER 14 | CHAPTER 15 | CHAPTER 16 | CHAPTER 17 | CHAPTER 18 | CHAPTER 19 |
Page 1 The blue locomotives and varnished teak cars of the Great Eastern Railway were described in Sekom, G.A., Locomotion in Victorian London, London: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Page 1 This account of the events of May 8, 1900 is based largely on the recollections of Bateson’s widow, Beatrice Bateson, in her introduction to his collected writings, William Bateson, F.R.S., Naturalist, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928, p. 73. It has been contradicted by the historian Robert Olby in "William Bateson’s Introduction of Mendelism to England: A Reassessment," British Journal of the History of Science, 1987, vol. 20, pp. 399-420, who says it is impossible for Bateson to have obtained a copy of the Mendel paper in time to bring it with him on the train to London, and impossible for him to read it and truly understood it all in a single hour. Most historians of science believe Olby’s reconstruction of events on that morning of May 8, 1900, and so do I. But I am fascinated by the legend that has been built up around Bateson’s supposed epiphany on the train, first by Bateson, then by his widow in her introductory memoir of Bateson, and finally in all the subsequent instances of Mendel/Bateson mythologizing. I present the scene here because it is a compelling story, and later in the book I will revisit this scene from a different perspective.
Page 2 Beatrice Bateson’s quote is from her memoir, William Bateson, F.R.S., Naturalist, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928, p. 73.
Page 3 Gillian Goodge, the librarian at the Royal Horticultural Society in London, told me in a phone conversation on Oct. 19, 1998, that most accounts place the old Drill Hall, which was owned by the London Scottish volunteers and was the site for RHS lectures from 1888-1904, somewhere on Buckingham Gate. She said one source states that Drill Hall was located on Jane Street in the Westminster section of London. In any event, one thing that’s certain is that Drill Hall no longer exists – though the RHS lecture series still does.
Page 3 Bateson’s quote is from the opening lines of "Problems of Heredity as a Subject for Horticultural Investigation," Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society, vol. xxv, Parts 1 and 2, 1900. The journal says the words were read on May 8, 1900, and the article was reprinted in Beatrice Bateson’s book, William Bateson, FRS, Naturalist. Olby points out that this journal article might not be the literal transcription of what Bateson said in London on May 8, but rather an edited version, revised to include more commentary about Mendel’s paper than he had originally made. This could mean that even the first two sentences aren’t exactly what he said to begin his lecture, either.
Page 3 This contemporaneous account, which focuses exclusively on Bateson’s comments on De Vries and makes no mention whatever of Mendel, is one of the bits of evidence that Robert Olby used to make his case that Bateson did not in fact discover Mendel’s paper on the train ride to London on May 8, 1900, but read it after his return to Cambridge, probably a week or so later. Another is the fact that De Vries’ first paper out of two that were published that spring – the only one that had been published by the time Bateson left for London on May 8 – in any case made no mention of Mendel’s paper in its footnotes. According to Olby, Bateson’s real introduction of Mendel’s work to the English-speaking world did not take place until 1902, with the publication of the translation of Mendel’s paper, "Experiments in Plant Hybridization," which Bateson oversaw. But more interesting than determining the exact moment when Bateson read Mendel’s paper is this: why did he consider it so important to perpetuate the myth that he read it on the train from Cambridge to London, saw instantly what it represented, and changed his prepared speech then and there? Was it to enlarge his own reputation for perspicacity? to be sure that the rediscovery story contained a few dramatic scenes? to guarantee himself a job? (Bateson was, after all, struggling to keep his family afloat, and would not find himself a permanent appointment at Cambridge University, where he was patching together a living from a variety of insufficient sources, for another eight years.) Several historians, in particular Bob Olby, Onno Meijer, and Will Provine, have been asking these questions for years.
Page 5 Among the scholars who see Mendel more as a lucky amateur than as an unappreciated genius is Will Provine of Cornell University, as expressed in an interview in his office in August 1998.
Page 7 The comment about the freedom to speculate about Mendel was made by Wilma George during a symposium on "The Past, Present and Future of Genetics," which was held in Kuparovice, Czechoslovakia on August 26-28, 1983. The proceedings were published in Orel, Vítezslav and Anna Matalová (eds.), Gregor Mendel and the Foundation of Genetics, Brno: The Mendelianum of the Moravian Museum, 1983, p. 314.
Chapter One: In the Glasshouse
Page 13 The history of the St. Thomas monastery building, which he called the Königinkloster, is from Hugo Iltis, Life of Mendel, pp. 44-45.
Page 13 The description of the conversion job that the monks performed on the nunnery is from Anna Matalová, director of the Mendelianum in Brno, during a personal interview in May 1999. She also provided a blueprint of a proposed flat for one of the St. Thomas priests, a contemporary of Mendel’s.
Page 14 Mendel’s quote is from his paper on peas, p. 4 in the Harvard translation.
Page 15 The story of Bishop Schaffgotsch’s ongoing feud with the St. Thomas monastery, and with Abbot Napp in particular, is told in Orel, Vítezslav, Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist, pp. 84-85. The story about Mendel having begun his crossbreeding on mice is from Iltis, Hugo, Life of Mendel, p. 92.
Page 16 Mendel’s quote about his original goals is from Isely, Duane, One Hundred and One Botanists, Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1994, p. 204.
Page 16 The word Mendel used in the opening of his lecture, Enkiekhugegesch, in relation to his hybrids can be translated as referring to either their "developments" or their "evolution" – the German word means both. These two concepts are quite different, however, and scholars have debated for years which of the two Mendel really meant: the development of an individual organism from conception to maturity, or the evolution of a population from one species into a new, closely related species.
Page 17 The Gymnasium curriculum, six years in length, was a classical academic course based on Greek, Latin, and the humanities. It was different from the curriculum at a Realschule, or technical school, which emphasized science and math and was not designed as preparation for continuing on to university.
Page 17 The Gutenberg poem, one of the only pieces of Mendel’s early writings that have been preserved, appears in Iltis, Hugo, Life of Mendel. Eden and Cedar Paul, trans. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. 1932, pp. 36-37. The poem had no title.
Page 20 A description of the philosophical institute is from Orel, Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist, p. 41.
Page 20 The quote about Mendel’s "anxious, sad outlook" during his time at Olmütz is from his 1850 autobiography, in which he referred to himself in the third person. It appears in Olby, Origins of Mendelism, p. 176.
Page 21 This quote is from the same autobiography, written by Mendel when he was 28 years old. This time it was quoted in Orel, Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist, p. 59.
Page 21 Although Father Franz lived in the St. Thomas monastery, which was composed of Augustinian monks, he actually belonged to a different order, the Premonstratensians, according to Orel, Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist, p. 44.
Page 22 Quotes from Franz’s letter to Napp regarding Mendel are from Iltis, Life of Mendel, p. 42.
Page 23 Information about the St. Thomas monks providing spiritual counseling to the prisoners was provided by Anna Matalová of the Mendelianum, May 1999.
Page: 23 In 1855, the Austrian government finally closed the Spielberg, horrified by the testimony of an Italian poet, Silvio Pellico, who had been imprisoned there in the 1820s. Among Pellico’s damning accounts of life in the Spielberg was the following: "Some 300 convicts, most of them robbers and murderers, were serving sentences," Pellico wrote, "some of `hard,’ others of ‘very hard’ labour. ‘Hard’ labour means to do forced labour, be chained by the ankle, sleep on bare boards, and eat the poorest imaginable food. ‘Very hard’ labour means to be even more horribly chained, with an iron ring round the waist and the chain fixed to the wall in such a way that you are close against the boards that serve as a bed, and can hardly walk. The food is the same although the law states: bread and water. As political prisoners we had been condemned to hard labour." The quote is from Silvio Pellico, My Prisons (I. G. Capaldi, trans.), London: Oxford University Press, 1963, p. 115. The fortress re-opened to the public in 1880 as a historical site. It has remained so ever since, a harmless tourist attraction only – with one notable exception. During World War II, the Nazis took over the Spielberg, and used it for the same foul purposes for which it had been used in the early nineteenth century: to house, torture, and kill a never-tallied number of doomed prisoners of war. The history of the Spielberg castle, now known by its Czech name, Špilberk, is from Humphreys, Rob, Czech & Slovak Republics: The Rough Guide, London and New York: Penguin Books, 1998, p. 276.
Page 23 Rules for how monks behaved, and how one order differed from another, are from Unstead, R. J., Monasteries, London: A&C Black Ltd., 1970. The quote about nighttime behavior for Benedictines is from pp. 55-56. The habits of the Carthusians are described on pp. 36-37.
Page 24 The history of the secular role of the Augustinians is from Orel, Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist, pp. 45-47.
Page 25 Napp’s question before the Sheep Breeders Association in 1837 was described in Orel, Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist, p. 32.
Page 25 Matouš Klácel, a fellow monk and close friend of Mendel’s, described Napp as "a famous prelate, scientist, secret freethinker and patriot, and expert in state affairs and economy." Cited in Anna Matalová, "A monument to F. M. Klácel (1809-1882) in the vicinity of the Mendel statue in Brno," Folia Mendeliana 14, 1979, p. 252.
Page 25 Examples of Abbot Napp’s imperiousness are from Iltis, Hugo, Life of Mendel, p. 48.
Page 25 Although Thaler was initially flummoxed by the sight of Napp, he quickly regained his composure and, proffering a deep bow, said with exaggerated reverence, "Lord, I am not worthy to come under thy roof." Then he simply turned himself around and staggered back into the night. The anecdote is related in Iltis, Life of Mendel, p. 50.
Page 26 Mendel’s course of study at the Brünn Theological College is from Iltis, Life of Mendel, p.55.
Page 26 Information about the reputation of the St. Thomas kitchen, and the trend for Moravian girls to learn to cook there and in places like it en route to Vienna to look for work as servants, came from Anna Matalová, personal interview, May 1999.
Page 26 The entries from Chef Luise Ondrackova’s "Kitchen Book" were translated by Sharon Wolchik, a neighbor and professor of political science at George Washington University, specializing in Czech politics, and by my neighbor, Marketa Chromkova. Menus for typical meals are listed on pages 536 (lunch and dinner) and 539 (snacks). On a grander day, when special guests were in attendance or when they were celebrating a birthday or other special occasion, the monks might splurge on lunch, the main meal of the day, with spinach soup, a pudding of goose liver in aspic, turkey with stuffing, lettuce salad, cake and chocolate ice cream (zmrzlina), fruit, and coffee. Dinner that day would be baked cauliflower, and a portion of veal that had been flattened and rolled around a stuffing made of vegetables and cheese.
Page 27 The quote from Augustine’s Rule, part 3, section 2, appears in Lawless, George, Augustine of Hippo and Monastic Rule, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987, p. 85.
Page 28 Details of how the monastery looked in Mendel’s time are from Iltis, Life of Mendel, pp. 45 ff, and from a visit to the monastery in May 1999.
Page 28 Iltis talks about the fox, a special favorite of Mendel’s, in Life of Mendel, p. 91.
Page 28 The list of birds seen in Brünn during Mendel’s day is from Anna Matalová, during our May 1999 interview. She also offered the story about the courtyard as a birdcage.
Chapter Two: Southern Exposure
page 29 Descriptions of the twelfth-century bible is from the twelfth-century bible in the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.
page 29 Information about colophons is from De Hamel, Christopher, Medieval Craftsmen: Scribes and Illuminations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992, p. 44.
page 30 The quote about God talking to you through reading is from Zumkeller, Adolar, Augustine’s Ideal of the Religious Life, Edmund Colledge, trans., New York: Fordham University Press, 1986.
Page 31 We cannot say with absolute certainty that the backs of the bookshelves were painted blue in the 1850s, but they are intensely blue now.
Page 31 According to Onno Meijer of the Free University of Amsterdam, the books purchased for the monastery library in Mendel’s day were largely scientific and technical books. After about 1890, when Mendel was dead and a new abbot, Anselm Rambousek, had taken his place, the practice switched. Now the biggest purchases, according to Meijer, were detective novels, to be read purely for entertainment.
Page 34 Information about Klácel comes from Orel, Vítezslav, "Mendel’s elder friar and teacher, Matthew Klácel," Quarterly Review of Biology, v. 47, pp. 435-436, 1972, and from Orel, Vítezslav, Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist, pp. 49-51.
Page 35 Klácel’s own one-sentence summary of Naturphilosophie, which he wrote on the back of his official monastery photograph, was this: "Deliberate university is the goal of all love and science." This notation is from Orel, Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist, p. 50.
Page 36 Details of the political situation in Brünn in 1848 are found in Orel, Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist , pp. 54-59.
Page 38 Reference to this comment about the bishop appears in the transcript of a performance given in the persona of Gregor Mendel as part of the symposium "Science as a Way of Knowing – Genetics," presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Zoologists, 27-30 December 1985, in Baltimore, Maryland. The performance, offered by Richard M. Eakin of the University of California at Berkeley dressed in monk’s garb from the 1860s, was part of Eakin’s "Great Scientists Speak Again" collection published in 1975 by the University of California Press, and was reprinted with permission in American Zoologist, vol. 26, pp. 749-752, 1986.
Page 38 His colleagues’ recollections of Mendel are from Iltis, Hugo, Life of Mendel, p. 60.
Page 38 This official report, which indicates that "in conversation he never used any word which in respect of moral or religious ecclesiastical principles or of political considerations could have been considered in any way inappropriate for a cleric to use or improper in a cleric’s mouth," appears in Iltis, Hugo, Life of Mendel, pp. 60-61.
Chapter Three: Between Science and God
Page 40 The story of the Brno dragon is from Humphreys, Rob, Czech and Slovak Republics: The Rough Guide, London: Penguin Books, 1998, p. 272.
Page: 41 Nietzsche announced that God is dead in Thus Spake Zarathustra, published in 1883. The statement appears on page 12 of Walter Kaufmann’s translation (New York: Penguin Books, 1978).
Page: 41 God seems to have died at least three times in the history of Christendom, when religion-inspired interest in nature turned itself inadvertently against religion. First, Aquinas stimulated the study of nature, thinking it would strengthen belief; the Galileo affair showed this was not necessarily true. Second, in the Glorious Revolution, natural science was hailed as the core of religion – but during the Enlightenment, God became unnecessary, since natural science was taken as a starting point quite separate from religious doctrine. Third, Darwin came up with a theory in the late nineteenth century that clashed directly with the church (as will be seen in chapter 9, in a dramatic debate between Darwin’s defender Thomas Henry Huxley and his adversary, Bishop "Soapy Sam" Wilberforce).
Page 41 According to Joseph Agassi ["The Problems of Scientific Validation," in Grmek, Mirko Drazen, Robert S. Cohen, and Guido Cimino, eds., On Scientific Discovery, Dordrectht, Holland, Boston, and London: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1981, p. 105.], Galileo said God had written two books, the Book of Nature and the Holy Writ, and since they both had the same author they could not be in any real conflict. Only the Holy Writ was under the jurisdiction of the Vatican, which truly, Galileo said, had no need to trouble itself with the details of the Book of Nature.
Page: 43 The contents of Serpetro’s "wonder room" are from Findlen, Paula, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, p. 65.
Page 43 Linnaeus’ explanation of the divine and non-divine origins of orders, classes, genera, species, and varieties is quoted in Olby, Robert, Origins of Mendelism, Second Edition, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985, pp. 267-268.
Page 44 Linnaean taxonomy and its modern equivalent are discussed in Weiner, Jonathan, The Beak of the Finch, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994, pp. 23-24. The specific categories for the rose and the human being are from Paul B. Weisz, Elements of Biology, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961, p. 121.
Page 44 The taxonomy of Fuchsia magellanica is from Parker, Sybil P., ed. Synopsis and Classification of Living Organisms, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982, p. 418.
Page 45 Linnaeus was quoted in Olby, Robert, Origins of Mendelism, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 3. On the next page, Olby says disparagingly of Linnaeus, "He seems to have all the answers." Onno Meijer, on the other hand, finds Linnaeus a sympathetic figure. "This man was world famous," Meijer wrote to me, "but he was the only one who doubted his own theories."
Page 46 The anthro-centric view of the earth and all its creatures is from Bowler, Peter J., Evolution: History of an Idea, p. 53.
Page 46 The suggestion that the discovery of entropy threatened this view was first made by my friend Roger Falcone, chairman of the department of physics at the University of California at Berkeley; further details were provided in Truesdell, Clifford, The Tragicomical History of Thermodynamics, 1822-1854, New York, Heidelberg, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1980.
Chapter Four: Breakdown in Vienna
Page 48 The chronology of Mendel’s examination in Vienna is from Hugo Iltis’ biography, Life of Mendel, pp. 61-74. Iltis calls the chapter describing this affair "Ploughed in an Examination."
Page 48 A brief summary of Baumgartner’s life appears in Iltis, Life of Mendel, p. 73. The year after Mendel’s exam, in 1851, Baumgartner became the Minister of Commerce.
Page 49 Kner’s comments on Mendel’s first essay are from Iltis, Life of Mendel, pp. 65-66.
Page 50 Will Provine of Cornell in particular liked to point to Mendel’s disastrous examination essays as proof that he was not at all an unappreciated genius, but a competent gardener and teacher of physics at the lower school level, who was overrated by posterity.
Page 51 Mendel’s entire essay reads as follows:
Order I: Quadrumana.
Order II: Quadrupeds. Among the animals notable for their utility to man may be mentioned: 1. the kangaroo which lives in New Holland in a wild state and whose flesh is greatly esteemed by the natives; 2. the hare; 3. the beaver.
Order III: Plantigrades.
Order IV: Clawed Ungulates: 1. the dog; 2. the wolf; 3. the cat, a useful animal because it exterminates mice, and because its soft and beautiful fur can be dressed by furriers; 4. the civet, whose anal glands secrete an aromatic substance which is an article of commerce.
Order V: Hoofed Ungulates, among the animals belonging to which order those especially useful to man are: 1. the horse; 2. the ass; 3. the ox; 4. the sheep; 5. the goat; 6. the chamois, the deer, and the stag; 7. the llama, much used in Mexico as a beast of burden carrying light loads up to one or two hundredweight; 8. the musk ox; 9. the reindeer; 10. what the reindeer is for the north, the camel is for the hot steppes; 11. the pig; 12. the elephant is a splendid beast of burden.
Order VI: Web-footed animals; etc.
Page 51 The "unmistakable good will" remark was made in the committee’s full report declaring Mendel unqualified to teach physics in the lower schools. The report is dated October 17, 1850, and quoted in Iltis, Hugo, Life of Mendel, pp. 71-72.
Page 51 Kner’s report, dated November 11, 1850, is quoted in Iltis on page 72.
Page 52 The full name of the University of Vienna was used only once in all my readings: in the biographical entry for Johann Christian Doppler, professor of experimental physics there from 1850-1852, written by A. E. Woodruff for the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, volume 4, pp. 167-168.
Page 52 Mendel’s first days in Vienna were described in Iltis, Hugo, Life of Mendel, pp. 76-77.
Page 53 Franz Grillparzer (1792-1872) was an active member of the Viennese intelligentsia at the same time that Mendel was in school there. His phrase for Vienna is from Barea, Ilsa, Vienna, New York: Knopf, 1966, p. 35.
Page 53 Mendel’s address in Vienna is from Iltis, Hugo, Life of Mendel, p. 78. The building, on a street that was in 1910 renamed Invalidenstrasse, has been torn down, replaced by a blocky, cement, Soviet-era building with zero charm. But the St. Elizabeth hospital is still next door, and now there is a beautiful public park, the Stadtpark, along the Invalidenstrasse on what would have been Mendel’s walk to the old university square.
Page 54 The description of the élèves, and Mendel’s place among them, is from Orel, Vítezslav, Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist, pp. 67-68.
Page 55 The relationship between Mendel and his mentor is described in George, Wilma, "Gregor Mendel and Andreas von Ettingshausen," Folia Mendeliana vol. 17, p. 214, 1982.
Page 56 The quote from Souriau is cited in Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation, New York: Dell Publishing, 1973, p. 145.
Page 56 The counting was done by Comte (knife killings), Galton (soldiers’ heights), and Florence Nightingale (causes of death). My thanks to Onno Meijer for pointing out the "avalanche of numbers" that erupted during Mendel’s time. This concept is more fully explored in Hacking, Ian, The Emergence of Probability: A philosophical study of early ideas about probability, induction and statistical inference. London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975.
Page 57 M. J. Schleiden’s work, Grundzüge der wissenschaftlichen Botanik nach einer methodologischen Einleitung als Einleitung zum Studium (Leipzig: Engelmann, pp. 141-148), is cited in Orel, Vítezslav, Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist, p. 70.
Page 57 The British hybridizers who had worked with peas, and about whom Franz Unger lectured, were John Goss and Alexander Seton, whose work from the early 1820s is described in Roberts, H.F., Plant Hybridization Before Mendel, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1929, pp. 102-103.
Page 57 Unger’s description of physiological botany is from Meijer, Onno G., "The Essence of Mendel’s Discovery," in Orel and Matalová, Eds., Gregor Mendel and the Foundation of Genetics, Brno, Czechoslovakia: The Mendelianum of the Mendel Museum in Brno, 1983, p. 126. Interestingly, this quote of Unger’s was used by Hugo De Vries, one of Mendel's three rediscoverers, as the epigraph to his doctoral thesis in 1870. But, as Meijer points out (in an e-mail in September 1999), "although it certainly characterizes de Vries that he was dedicated to scientific materialism, it was nothing very special at the time."
Page 58 Information about Nave’s biography is from Iltis, Hugo, Life of Mendel, p. 80.
Page 59 Mendel’s quote is from his Pisum paper, page 10 of the version that is posted on MendelWeb.
Chapter Five: Back to the Garden
Page 60 A description of the train ride from Brünn to Vienna is from Baedecker, Karl, Austria, including Hungary, Transylvania, Dalmatia, and Bosnia. Leipsic: Karl Baedeker, 1900, pp. 267-268.
Page 60 Robert Olby, in his Origins of Mendelism, pp. 99-100, says Mendel applied to take the teaching exam in 1855, but didn’t actually go to Vienna to sit for it until May 1856. Vítezslav Orel, in contrast, says that he both arranged for his exam AND took it in the spring of 1855 (pp. 86-87). I have chosen to go with Olby’s timetable – largely because so many other sources agree that Mendel embarked on his pea experiments almost as soon as he returned from his Viennese fiasco.
Page 62 The relationship between Fenzl and Mendel, and the story told by his grandson Tschermak, is in Orel, Vítezslav, Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist, p. 87. The question of whether Tschermak deserved to be considered a true "rediscoverer" has been raised repeatedly since the rediscovery, most forcefully by Stern and Sherwood, who in 1966 decided he did not. More about this issue will be reviewed in Chapter 15.
Page 63 The quote from Unger’s letter, which appeared weekly in the Wiener Zeitung, is from Orel, Vítezslav, Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist, p. 71. Orel, in turn, is quoting from a translation of Franz Unger’s Botanische Briefe (C. Gerold, Vienna, 1852), by B. Paul, published in London 1863 as Unger, Franz, Botanical Letters to a Friend.
Page 63 Sebastian Brunner’s invectives, printed in the Catholic newspaper Wiener Kirchenzeitung, seemed strangely timed to the publications of Franz Unger’s books, growing more strident as the books became more popular: in 1851, when Unger’s book of paleobotany, The Primitive World in its Various Transitional Periods, was published; in 1852, when "The Botanical Letters" were collected in book form; in 1855, on the publication of Unger’s textbook on the anatomy and physiology of plants. Brunner mounted his most vicious attack in January 1856, sparked by a positive review of Unger’s textbook in a respected church newspaper.
Page 64 The events surrounding the threatened expulsion of Franz Unger were described in Orel, p. 72.
Page 64 Karl von Nägeli’s quote is from his Individuality in Nature with Especial Reference to the Vegetable Kingdom. It was cited in Iltis, Hugo, Life of Mendel, p. 186.
Page 65 Pope Pius IX’s quote, and information about the Syllabus of Errors being compiled in Mendel’s time, is from Walsh, Michael, An Illustrated History of the Popes, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980, p. 200.
Page: 65 The progressive bent of the Moravian Catholic church in the late nineteenth century was emphasized in a personal communication from Onno Meijer, September 1999.
Page 66 Mendel’s special fondness for cucumbers was described by Anna Matalová during a visit with her in May 1999.
Page 66 Details about the greenhouse plans, and the timing of its building and of the conversion of the old glasshouse to an orangery, are from Vítezslav Orel, "The building of greenhouses in the monastery garden of Old Brno at the time of Mendel’s experiments," Folia Mendeliana, vol. 10, 1975, pp. 201-211.
Page 67 An inventory of furnishings in the orangery can be found in Vítezslav Orel, "The building of greenhouses in the monastery garden of old Brno at the time of Mendel’s experiments," Folia Mendeliana, vol. 10, p. 207. 1975.
Page 68 Information about the Czech calendar is from Rob Humphreys, Czech & Slovak Republic: The Rough Guide, London, Penguin Books, 1996, p. 488. The whole calendar can be translated as follows: January, ice; February, hibernation; March, birch; April, oak; May, blossom; June, red; July, redder; August, sickle; September, blazing; October, rutting; November, leaves falling; December, slaughter of the pig.
Page 68 Information about how Mendel conducted his weather readings is from Anna Matalová, May 1999 interview, and from Iltis, pp. 222 ff. According to Iltis, there was also a minimum-and-maximum thermometer hanging in the beehouse garden, attached to a porch pillar that faced north, and in the abbot’s garden near the prelacy there was a rain gauge.
Chapter Six: Crossings
Page 70 The non-round peas are usually described as "wrinkled" rather than "angular," but one of the most careful translators of Mendel’s paper has made a convincing case that the word Mendel used for this characteristic, kantig, translates more accurately as "angular." "A search through English botanical texts confirms the accuracy of this description," writes the translator, Eva R. Sherwood: "the seeds are irregularly shaped, asymmetrically compressed, with smooth surfaces meeting at an angle." Because many Mendel scholars, including Bob Olby, consider Sherwood’s translation to be the most authoritative, we will call these peas angular rather than wrinkled. The explanation is in Stern, Curt and Eva R. Sherwood (eds.), The Origin of Genetics: A Mendel Source Book, San Francisco and London: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1966, footnote on pp. 2-3.
Page 70 The old saying about Gregor’s day, and a description of saint’s days on the old Catholic calendar, are from Anna Matalová, personal interview, May 1999. March 12 is also Gregor’s day on the Catholic calendar currently in use.
Page 71 The need to do crossbreeding early in the day is mentioned in Punnett, Reginald C., "Early Days of Genetics," an address delivered at the 100th meeting of The Genetical Society in Cambridge, June 20, 1949 and reprinted the following year in the journal Heredity, v. 4, part I, 1950, p. 7.
Page 72 Mendel’s response to his students’ tittering about his lectures on reproduction is mentioned in Iltis, p. 93.
Page 72 The explanation for why the castrated plants wore calico caps is from Corcos, Alain F. and Floyd V. Monaghan, Gregor Mendel’s Experiments on Plant Hybrids: A Guided Study, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993, p. 66.
Page 72 The story of the Aeolian lyre in Mendel’s garden is from Iltis, Hugo, Life of Mendel, p. 93.
Page 74 Onno Meijer took great pains to explain the long tradition of crossbreeding in a personal communication of September 1999. "There is not doubt," he wrote in an e-mail, "that farmers tried to improve their crops, by fertilizing or crossing, since time immemorial. One of the beliefs was that transmutation was possible – not only in witch-stories where you could be turned into a frog, but also in science. Note that alchemy was Newton’s greatest occupation. . . . No reasonable mind from, say, the first settlers of Jericho up to the time of Mendel, could doubt that species could sometimes change over the generations."
Page 74 Kölreuter’s quote is from Olby, Robert, Origins of Mendelism, p. 34. According to Olby, Kölreuter was especially "delighted" when the hybrids turned out to be sterile.
Page 74 In Kölreuter's time, the very existence of hybrids -- at least fertile hybrids -- went against the teachings of science, philosophy, and religion. "Nature was supposed to preserve the same order and harmony as had reigned in the garden of Eden," wrote Robert Olby in Origins of Mendelism (p. 26). "But if man can create new species whenever he chooses simply by hybridizing existing species there would be no end to the confusion. . . . Such a state of affairs was unthinkable to the pious naturalists of the eighteenth century, and Kölreuter, who did not doubt that plant hybrids can be produced, was sure that nature has her own ways of preventing them from producing fresh species. The chief aim of his work was to find out these hidden measures."
Page 75 The Bible quote is from Leviticus, chapter 19, verse 19.
Page 76 Although the logic behind the essay contests was sensible, it did not always work in practice. In 1759, for instance, the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg – which, by coincidence, included on its prize panel Joseph Kölreuter, who at the time was working at the Academy classifying fish and coral -- offered a 50-ducat prize for an essay either confirming or refuting the existence of sex in plants. Only one person, the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, entered; he won, for an entry that confirmed that all plants did indeed reproduce sexually.
Page 76 The original German title of Gärtner’s magnum opus was Versuche und Beobachtungen über die Bastarderzeugung im Planzenreichm.
Page: 76 Details of Gärtner’s experiments with peas, maize, and tobacco, and his theories explaining his results, are presented in Olby, Robert, Origins of Mendelism, second edition, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985, pp. 23-37.
Page 77 Mendel expressed frustration with trying to replicate Gärtner’s experiments in his Pisum paper, p. 9 on MendelWeb version, and put the sentence in italics for emphasis.
Page 78 The quote about deducing laws of transmission is from Mendel’s paper, p. 4 of the MendelWeb version.
Page 79 I counted the number of times the words Merkmal or the plural Merkmale (German nouns that end in consonants take a final e for their plurals) and Elemente appeared in the German-language version of Mendel’s paper, conveniently available for downloading – and computer searching -- from the MendelWeb site. I first had the idea to do so after a conversation with Simon Mawer, an English writer, biology teacher and author of the scientific novel Mendel’s Dwarf, during a trip he made to New York in July 1999.
Page 80 Mendel introduced the terms "dominating" and "recessive" in his lecture of February and March, 1865. "Dominating" has since come to be known as "dominant."
Chapter Seven: First Harvest
Page 83 The numbers of plants, blossoms (and therefore pods) and peas that Mendel counted comes from several sources. Mendel, on page 7 of the MendelWeb version of his paper, says there were "more than 10,000 plants which were carefully examined." Margaret Campbell, in "Explanations of Mendel’s Results" (Centaurus, vol. 20, pp. 159-174, 1976), calculates that Mendel pollinated 3 to 5 (on average, 4) flowers per plant, and that from each plant he got an average of 28 to 37 peas (on average, 32.5). And Federico di Trocchio, in "Mendel’s Experiments: A Reinterpretation," (Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 24, pp. 485-519, 1991), summarizes Campbell’s calculations, and compares them to the full potential of most Pisum plants, which are capable of producing more than 60 pods per plant, each of which contains 6 to 9 seeds, or a total for each plant of 400 to 500 peas. Clearly, di Trocchio concludes, Mendel did not use each plant to its full potential.
Page 84 Regarding Mendel’s passion for numbers, one of his students recalled to Mendel’s biographer, Hugo Iltis, that the priest used to adopt an odd arithmetical method for calling on boys in class. "Each boy had his own number," wrote Iltis in Life of Mendel (p. 90), "determined by his progress in the class. Mendel, fluttering the pages of a book, would select one of the numbers, 12 for instance. Then he would say: "Twice 12 is 24, and 24 plus 12 is 36. I shall examine no. 36." Iltis believed Mendel’s playfulness with numbers was a reflection of his effort, during those days, to work out "the numerical ratios of inheritance." But it could just as easily have happened the other way. Maybe his search for ratios was the result, not the cause, of a love of counting and arithmetic that had existed in Mendel his whole life, long before he planted his first pea.Page 85 The exact timing of experiment 2 vis-a-vis experiment 1 – or, for that matter, vis-a-vis experiments 3 through 7 for each of the other independent characteristics – is not really known. Mendel never gave a precise timetable for which crossings he did during which year, nor did he indicate to what extent the experiments overlapped. The timing here is based on interviews with Bob Olby and Anna Matalová, readings of Vítezslav Orel, and a projected schedule proposed by Corcos and Monaghan in their book, Gregor Mendel’s Experiments on Plant Hybrids: A Guided Study pp. 190-191.
Page 85 Once Mendel found this three-to-one ratio in his first few monohybrid crosses, he began to expect it in all subsequent F2 peas or plants. This might have led him to stop counting once the ratio was clearly established – or even to categorize certain peas or plants according to his expectations. (There is, for instance, only the slightest difference between a pea that is yellowish-green and a pea that is greenish-yellow; which pile should Mendel put such a pea in, the green pile or the yellow one?) Because of his expectation of a three-to-one ratio, which became entrenched as a hypothesis as Mendel’s Pisum work continued, he might have made some decisions, either conscious or unconscious, to make his data more convincing. These nearly-perfect ratios were the source, in the 1930s, of suggestions that Mendel’s data were, based on sophisticated statistical analysis, too good to be true, and that the priest must have "fudged" his data. For a thorough discussion of this controversy, see the paper that started it all – Fisher, Ronald A., "Has Mendel’s Work Been Rediscovered?" Annals of Science, vol. 1, pp. 115-137, 1936 -- and also more recent papers that come down on both sides of the question: Orel, Vítezslav, "Will the story of `too good’ results of Mendel’s data continue?" BioScience 18, pp. 776-778, 1968; Cock, AG, "Faking and the intent to deceive," British Medical Journal 281, pp. 1214-15, 1980; Edwards, A.W.F., "Are Mendel’s results really too close?" Biological Review, 61, pp. 295-312, 1986; and Sapp, Jan, "The Nine Lives of Gregor Mendel," in H.E. Le Grand, ed., Experimental Enquiries, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990.
Page 87 Details of Naudin’s life are from the entry written by William Coleman in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, p. 618. His 1856 paper, "Observations constatant le retour simultané de la descendance d’une plante hybride aux types paternels et maternels." Comptes Rendus Acad. Sci., Paris, 42:628, is cited in Olby, Robert, Origins of Mendelism, 1985, p. 48.
Page 90 The terms "phenotype" and "genotype" were coined by the Danish geneticist Wilhelm Johannsen in 1909 (Mayr, Ernst, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance, Cambridge MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982, p. 782). For more information on the lexicon of genetics in the early 1900s, see chapter 17.
Page 91 Mendel’s teaching schedule at Brünn Tech is from Orel, Vítezslav, Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist, p. 81.
Page 92 Recollections of Mendel made by his former students are recorded in Iltis, Hugo, Life of Mendel, pp. 88-89.
Page 92 The story about Mendel throwing peas at inattentive schoolboys is from Isely, Duane, One Hundred and One Botanists, Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1994, p. 203.
Page 92 The legend surrounding the odd timing of the clock chimes in Brno is mentioned in the guidebook edited by Alfred Horn, Czech & Slovak Republics, London: APA Publications, 1998, p. 243.
Page 93 Mendel’s comment about the rejuvenating effects of gardening is from his letter to Nägeli, April 18, 1867, Stern and Sherwood, The Origin of Genetics: A Mendel Source Book, p. 70.
Chapter Eight: Eve’s Homunculus
Page 95 The quotes from the traditional story of Adam and Eve are from Genesis, chapter II, verse 7.
Page 96 A nice description of the oft-told tale of Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of what he called animalcules is in Gould, Laura, Cats are not Peas: A Calico History of Genetics, New York: Springer-Verlag, 1996, pp. 65-66.
Page 96 A brief biography of Maupertuis (1698-1759) can be found in Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, pp. 328-329. His quote, which appears in Mayr on page 329, is from Maupertuis’ Essaie de cosmologie of 1750.
Page 96 Maupertuis’ theory of fluid semen is summarized in Bowler, Peter J. Evolution: The History of an Idea, revised edition, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1989, p. 71.
Page 97 Buffon’s preferred writing attire is described in Wightman, William P.D., The Growth of Scientific Ideas. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951, p. 361.
Page 97 The quote from Hamlet is from the Penguin edition of the William Shakespeare play (New York: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 73.
Page 97 Buffon’s notion of an internal template is from Bowler, Peter J., Evolution: The History of an Idea. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1989, p. 73.
Page 98 In point of fact, mixing yellow and true blue paint will create black; the "blue" that is used in elementary school is more accurately known as "cyan." My thanks to Bob Donaldson, physics teacher at Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, for pointing this out.
Page 98 Robert Olby discusses thoughts about blending inheritance in his chapter, "Blending and Non-Blending Heredity: Darwin, Naudin and Galton," pp. 40-71 of Origins of Mendelism, second edition, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Chapter Nine: The Flowering of Darwinism
Page 100 The raucous meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science is described in Bowler, Peter J., Evolution: The History of an Idea, revised edition, Berkeley, London, and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989, p. 187.
Page 101 Darwin’s quote from the Origin is cited in H.M.S. Beagle, an online biweekly science magazine, June 25, 1999.
Page 101 The greatest fame would come to Thomas Henry Huxley’s two grandsons, the brothers Aldous, author of Point Counter Point and Brave New World, and Julian, professor of zoology at King’s College, London and the first director-general of UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization).
Page 102 Accounts of the showdown between Huxley and Wilberforce are from Irvine, William, Apes, Angels and Victorians: The Story of Darwin, Huxley, and Evolution. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955, and Jensen, J. Vernon, Thomas Henry Huxley: Communicating for Science. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1991.
Page 102 In a letter to his friend Darwin, Robert Hooker called Henry Draper a "Yankee donkey."
Page 102 Huxley’s long-winded explication of his retort to Soapy Sam is from a letter he wrote to Dr. F. D. Dyster, dated 9 September 1860, in the Huxley papers, vol. 15, files 117-119, cited by Jensen, J. Vernon, Thomas Henry Huxley: Communicating for Science. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991.
Page 103 The anonymous put-down of Darwin’s "hypothesis" is quoted from "Dr. Draper and Evolution," Catholic World, vol. 26, p. 775, 1878.
Page 104 John Lightfoot’s precise demarcation of the timing of Man’s creation is described in Bowler, Peter J., Evolution: The History of an Idea, revised edition, Berkeley, LA, London: University of California Press, 1989, p. 4.
Page 104 Information about Robert Fitzroy’s family history of mental illness is from Gould, Stephen J., Ever Since Darwin, New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1977, p. 29.
Page 105 Gould, Stephen J., Ever Since Darwin, mentions the political conflicts between Darwin and Fitzroy on p. 32. He goes so far as to say that it was Fitzroy’s intractable, obnoxious creationism that spurred Darwin to his theory of natural selection.
Page 105 The story of the ill-fated Robert McCormick is told in Gould, Stephen J., Ever Since Darwin, pp. 30-31. As for Fitzroy, Gould says (p. 33) that he became "unhinged" at the end of his life, blaming himself for Darwin’s heretical views and consumed with a "burning desire" to expiate his guilt. He appeared at the 1860 meeting of the British Association waving a Bible over his head and shouting, "The Book, The Book." In 1865, he shot himself.
Page 106 The summary of Erasmus Darwin’s work and reputation is from two sources: Peter J. Bowler Evolution: History of an Idea, revised edition, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1989, pp. 81-82; and David Young, The Discovery of Evolution, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 56 and 79.
Page 106 The effect on Darwin of Charles Lyell’s geological writings is described in Bowler, Peter J, Evolution: The History of an Idea, pp. 157-158. The thinking of Lyell’s predecessor, James Hutton, who created the first comprehensive Vulcanist theory that Lyell later transmuted into uniformitarianism, is described in the same book, pp. 45-49.
Page 107 Lamarck’s theory of organic progression is described in Bowler, Peter J., Evolution: The History of an Idea, pp. 83-85.
Page 108 Darwin himself gives a great deal of credit to his reading of Malthus as a crucial element in his conceptualization of natural selection, as remembered in his Autobiography, written for his children when he was in his seventies and published by his son Francis five years after his death. But at least one modern historian’s (Lindley Darden’s) interpretation of Darwin’s notebooks, kept contemporaneously during these fertile years in which his thoughts on transmutation were coalescing, suggests that Darwin had come much further in his own thinking about natural selection by the time he finally encountered Malthus’ work in 1838 – so far, in fact, that he was almost there, even without Malthus. Here we stick to the story that is closer to the way Darwin himself remembered it.
Page 109 Quotes from the Vestiges come from Mayr, Ernst, The Growth of Biological Thought, p.383.
Page 110 According to Ernst Mayr, Sedgwick took Darwin on a geological field trip to Wales, teaching the younger man details of geological mapping. Despite this early exposure to Darwin, Sedgwick remained a staunch opponent of his theories of natural selection until the day he died. (Mayr, pp. 397 and 117).
Page 110 Peter J. Bowler (in Evolution: The History of an Idea, p. 147), says Sedgwick’s critique, published in the Edinburgh Review in 1845, was a "rambling" 85 pages; Ernst Mayr, (in The Growth of Biological Thought, p. 382), says Sedgwick "required no less than four hundred pages of print to state all of his objections." I chose the 85 pages because it was the only one of the two with an actual citation. The quotes come from Mayr’s book, though Bowler also alludes to Sedgwick’s urge to protect "our glorious maidens and matrons."
Page 110 Sedgwick’s comments are cited in Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, p.382.
Page 110 Not only did Chambers prepare the British public for the theories of the Origin; he converted some of the period’s leading thinkers to a faith in transmutation. Among them were Herbert Spencer, the British journalist; Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher; Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American poet; and, most significantly in terms of Darwin’s own work, the British naturalist Arthur Russel Wallace.
Page 110 Darwin’s dissemination of his 1844 essay is described in Bowler, Peter J., Evolution: The History of an Idea, p. 175.
Page 111 The significance of barnacles for the development of Darwin’s theory of descent with modification is from Bowler, Peter J., Evolution: History of an Idea, pp. 176-177. Bowler also mentions, on these same pages, the value of Darwin’s comprehensive study of barnacles in his ability to distinguish species from varieties, and his subsequent belief that varieties were in effect "incipient species."
Page 111 Darwin’s various occupations in preparation for the publication of the Origin is from Desmond, Adrian and James Moore, Darwin, New York: Time Warner, 1991, pp. 423-444. In addition, they write, the ailing naturalist "filled 300 large foolscap sheets with tabulations to prove that wide-ranging `large genera,’ those containing many species, were expanding." [p. 448]. The possible conditions from which he might have been ailing are listed in Bowler, Peter J., Evolution: The History of an Idea, p. 175.
Page 112 Wallace’s first, ill-fated expedition is described in Bowler, Peter J., Evolution: The History of an Idea, p. 184, as is his epiphany on Gilolo.
Page 113 The published form of Wallace’s essay, "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type," which appeared along with two letters from Darwin in the Proceedings of the Linnaean Society on August 20, 1858, was reprinted in Bates, Marston and Philip S. Humphrey (eds.), The Darwin Reader, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1956, pp. 106-114.
Page 113 Details about Wallace and Darwin are from Mayr, Ernst, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1982, pp. 421-423.
Page 113 In his autobiography, Darwin recollects the cutting remark about his and Wallace’s articles – the only response they generated -- as coming from one Professor Haughton of Dublin.
Page 114 Galton’s Law of Ancestral Inheritance is described in Olby, Origins of Mendelism, pp. 53-54, and in Mayr, Ernst, The Growth of Biological Thought, pp. 784-785.
Page 114 Darwin’s theory of pangenesis is laid out in his second major work, published in 1868, Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication. It is described in Mayr, Ernst, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982, pp. 693-694.
Page 115 Fleeming Jenkin is quoted, rather derisively, by Mayr, who says (on p. 514) that he never understood why Darwin himself, and other evolutionists right up to the modern day, have considered Jenkins such a brilliant critic of the theory of natural selection. In Mayr’s view, Jenkins’ writings show that he had no basic understanding of what Darwin was talking about.
Page 115 Yarrell’s Law is described in Olby, Origins of Mendelism, p. 42.
Page 116 A list of Galton’s odd series of experiments is in the entry about him, written by Norman T. Gridgeman, in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 5, pp. 265-266.
Page 117 Galton’s anti-gemmule experiments on rabbits are described in Olby, Robert, Origins of Mendelism, 1985, p. 54, and briefly in Dunn, L.C., A Short History of Genetics, Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1965, p.38.
Chapter Ten: Garden Reflections
Page 120 Hugo Iltis describes the beekeeping that occupied the last decade of Mendel’s life in Life of Mendel, chapter 15 ("Mendel as Gardener and Beekeeper"), pp. 208–220. One of Mendel’s goals in his beekeeping was to see whether his Pisum findings applied in animals. But bees proved an especially frustrating research model. Despite the elaborate fertilization cages Mendel invented and built, he was never able to limit which drones mated with the queen, and his pedigrees were therefore too inaccurate to allow him to draw any meaningful conclusions about bee hybridization.
Page 121 The quote about the perils of the universal laws of gravity is from Mendel’s third letter to Nägeli, cited in Hugo Iltis, Life of Mendel, p. 110.
Page 121 The Crystal Palace, designed by Sir Joseph Paxton, was dismantled after the London Exhibition and rebuilt in Sydenham in South London, where it remained until 1936, when it was destroyed by fire. A short entry about it appears in Microsoft Encarta 98 under the heading "Crystal Palace."
Page 121 Details about the London Exhibition, including building dimensions (pp. 33-34) and proposed amateur exhibits (pp. 51-53) are from John Timbs, The Industry, Science, & Art of the Age: or, The International Exhibition of 1862, London: Lockwood & Co., 1863. Timbs describes the Austrian exhibition in the same book, pp. 296-300.
Page 122 Julia Pastrana’s career as a sideshow freak is described in Peter Mason, "Curiouser and Curiouser," The Sciences, May/June 1998, p. 41. The entries submitted for consideration for inclusion in the 1862 exhibition are described in John Timbs, The Industry, Science & Art of the Age: The International Exhibition of 1862.
Page 123 Brünn’s fortunes in the 1850s and 1860s were described by both Anna Matalová and Vítezslav Orel during personal interviews in May 1999.
Page 124 The photo of the Moravian delegation at the Grand Hotel in Paris in July 1862 is reprinted in Vítezslav Orel, Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist, on page 196, as Figure 5.16.
Page 125 Über die Entstehung der Arten, the German translation of The Origin of Species, was translated by H. G. Bronn and published in Stuttgart by Schweizerbart in 1860. The same publisher came out with a second German-language edition in 1863.
Page 125 The distinction between Mendel’s and Darwin’s systems of evolution as being, respectively, open and closed, was made by Anna Matalová in an interview in May 1999. She also made a distinction between Darwin’s belief in the continuity of form, and Mendel’s belief in the continuity of information.
Page 126 Information about Darwin’s children is from Geoffrey West, Charles Darwin: A Portrait. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938.
Page 126 The problems created by the choice of seed coat as the third trait were described in Alain F. Corcos and Floyd V. Monaghan, Gregor Mendel’s Experiments on Plant Hybrids: A Guided Study, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993. On pp. 192-195, the authors present a probable growing schedule for the trihybrid cross, which has Mendel beginning his work in the spring of 1859. His original hybridization, according to this schedule, occurs in the summer of 1859. That fall, he collects 24 round yellow F1 peas with brown coats, (though the brown coat is from the parent generation, not from the F1) and plants them the following spring. In the fall of 1860, he collects 687 F2 seeds. All have brown seed coats (the F1 hybrid dominant), and they are divided among round, angular, yellow, and green. He plants all 687 seeds in the spring of 1861, and allows those that grow to maturity (only 639) to self-fertilize that summer. In the fall of 1861, he collects the F3 peas and examines their shape, color, and coat color (the latter of which represents the F2’s). In this way, he infers which of the F2 peas had been hybrids for shape and color, and which were pure-breeding. In the spring of 1862, he sows a sample from each of his 639 bags of peas – the authors estimate "probably 10 seeds from each," for a total of 6,390 peas, and when, in the fall of 1862, he harvests those that successfully self-fertilized, he is looking at their seed coat color only, as a way to determine retrospectively which of the F2 seed coats had been hybrid and which pure-breeding for brown (dominating) or white (recessive).
Page 127 The "taste for botany" of Winkelmayer, "a good-natured Bavarian" (which might be a code word for excessively fat, judging from his picture), is described by Hugo Iltis, Life of Mendel, p. 51, who says he was "a helpful assistant in the experimental work" of Mendel.
Page 127 Mendel states his hypothesis about recessive determinants in his paper (page 24 in the MendelWeb version) as follows: "the pea hybrids form egg and pollen cells which, in their constitution, represent in equal numbers all constant forms which result from the combination of the characters united in fertilization."
Page 128 Mendel describes the results of his backcrosses on page 22 of his paper in the MendelWeb version. The numbers reported here are really the collapsing of two smaller double recessive backcrosses, one in which the double recessive acted as the male parent (that is, providing the pollen), the other in which it was the female parent (providing the ovum). Mendel found that these so-called "reciprocal" crosses were found, in every instance, to produce the same results no matter which type was the male and which the female. It was like the commutative property of arithmetic, which states that you can multiply two (or more) numbers together in any order and always get the same result.
Page 129 Mendel’s enthusiastic comment on his experiment’s success is from his paper, page 22 in the MendelWeb version. His subsequent findings with backcrosses are described on page 27.
Page 130 Mendel describes his third generation backcrosses on page 27 of his paper in the MendelWeb version.
Page 131 In a widely-read paper in the 15 April 1936 issue of Annals of Science (vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 115-137), the noted statistician R. A. Fisher, Galton Professor of Eugenics at University College, London, submitted Mendel’s results to statistical analysis, using such modern concepts as the chi-square test, and concluded that Mendel’s results were too good to be true. In the paper, "Has Mendel’s Work Been Rediscovered?" Fischer never accused Mendel of falsification, but did suggest that maybe he or an over-eager assistant had tended to categorize the peas or plants in a particular way so as to make the numbers appear more convincing, or had stopped counting once the ratio met Mendel’s expectations. Fisher’s analysis has been used ever since to bolster the claim that Mendel had "fudged his data" – a claim that has never been conclusively demonstrated, even by Fisher himself, and that has been vehemently denied by a series of ardent Mendel defenders.
Chapter Eleven: Full Moon in February
Page 133 Details of the scene of Mendel arriving for his lecture are from Hugo Iltis, Life of Mendel, p. 176.
Page 135 Information about Nave and Mendel’s other friends from his university days is from Hugo Iltis, Life of Mendel, p. 80.
Page 135 Thiemer’s role in the Natural Science Society is described in Vítzeslav Orel, Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist, p. 89.
Page 136 Auspitz’s role as editor of the Brünn Tagesbote is described in Vítezslav Orel, Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist, p. 273. Orel adds that Auspitz "might have asked Mendel himself to submit a report on his own lecture, and then might simply have adapted it for printing."
Page 136 The letter from Gregor Mendel that mentioned the "divided opinion" that greeted his first lecture was written to Carl von Nägeli on April 18, 1867 (letter #2) and reprinted in English translation in Curt Stern and Eva R. Sherwood (eds.), The Origin of Genetics: A Mendel Source Book, San Francisco and London: W. H. Freeman, 1966, p. 61.
Page 137 I dated the probable period of Mendel’s mathematical analysis of his data as between 1859 and 1862 after reading the proposed schedule of experiments in Alain F. Corcos and Floyd V. Monaghan, Gregor Mendel’s Experiments on Plant Hybrids: A Guided Study, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993, Appendices C and D, pp. 190-195.
Page 138 A description of the audience reaction to Mendel’s first lecture (as well as his second) is from Hugo Iltis, Life of Mendel, p. 177.
Page 139 The term "botanical mathematics" is from Hugo Iltis, Life of Mendel, p. 177.
Page 139 Information about Pythagoras’s life, and the beliefs of his followers, is from the entry by Kurt von Fritz in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 11, pp. 219-224. Among the many apocryphal stories about Pythagoras (including the one about the dog) is that his reverence for beans was responsible for his death. When he was about sixty years old, the story goes, Pythagoras was being pursued by unnamed enemies in the Greek city of Metapontum. His pursuers chased him right up to the edge of a bean field, and there he stopped. Pythagoras refused to trample all those reincarnated babies, so was forced to faced down his opponents – who murdered him.
Page 140 The first full and completely correct description of meiosis was published in 1890 by Oskar Hertwig. Hertwig’s work, and the work of predecessors such as Strasburger, Weismann, and Boveri, is described in a section on the history of meiosis in Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1982, pp. 761-764.
Page 141 Mendel’s results with flower color in Phaseolus are described in his paper on page 29 of the MendelWeb version.
Page 141 The notion that Mendel presented his lectures hoping to encourage his colleagues to conduct experiments that might confirm or refute his own is offered by Robert Olby, Origins of Mendelism, p.117. He bases this theory primarily on comments Mendel made in his second letter to Nägeli on 18 April 1867.
Page 141 Mendel made his comments about the implications of his findings in terms of explaining speciation and the conservation of certain inheritable traits in his Pisum paper, page 31 of the MendelWeb version.
Page 142 The relationship between Mendel and Kerner von Marilaun during their university days is from Vítezslav Orel, Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist, p. 72.
Page 143 Several sources, such as A. H. Sturtevant, A History of Genetics, New York: Harper & Row, 1965, p. 25, mention the fact that many of the recovered reprints of Mendel’s paper were found uncut, indicating that the recipient had never read them. But Anna Matalová, director of the Mendelianum in Brno, insists that the original reprints were all cut at the printer’s, even before they were bound – so it would have been impossible for the ones found in various libraries across the Continent to have been uncut. I am using the more common story, about the uncut reprints, because so many scholars tell it that way, and because it is a graphic demonstration about one fact that probably was true: that most of the scientists who got the reprint, pre-cut or not, never bothered to read it.
Page 143 The story of Darwin’s crosses with snapdragons is told by Conway Zirkle, "The knowledge of heredity before 1900," in L. C. Dunn (ed.), Genetics in the 20th Century: Essays on the Progress of Genetics During its First 50 Years, New York: Macmillan, 1951, p. 50.
Page 144 The story of Beijerinck and Ivanovsky is from Peter Radetsky, The Invisible Invaders, Boston, Toronto, London: Little, Brown, 1991, pp. 62-69.
Page 144 Beijerinck’s note to De Vries was quoted by De Vries’s assistant, Theo J. Stomps, in his article "On the rediscovery of Mendel’s work by Hugo De Vries," Journal of Heredity, vol. 45, 1954, p. 294.
Page 145 An indication that the reprint found at Graz University was uncut is from Vítezslav Orel, Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist, p. 276.
Page 146 What Schleiden wrote was the following: "A complete theoretical explanation, in which we explain the interconnection of facts that are subjected to laws in terms of the latter, is possible only on the basis of mathematics and only in so far as mathematical treatment is feasible." It appeared in his book, Grundzüge der wissenschaftlichen Botanik nach einer methodologischen Einleitung als Einleitung zum Studium. Leipzig: Engelmann, p. 39, which was cited in English translation and in turn was quoted in Vítezslav Orel, Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist, p. 70.
Page 146 The fate of Mendel’s reprints is discussed in Weiling, Franz, "Fünf weitere Sonderdrucke der Versuche über Pflanzen-hybriden J. G. Mendels Aufgetaucht," Folia Mendeliana, vol. 19, 1984, pp. 257-263.
Chapter Twelve: The Silence
Page 152 The date when Nägeli’s first letter "came to hand," according to Hugo Iltis, Life of Mendel, p. 191, was 27 February 1867. It had been written two days earlier, on 25 February 1867.
Page 152 The dates of the typewriter’s invention (1867), patenting (1868), and marketing (1874) are from the online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, the "micropedia," vol. 12, Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica Inc., 1997.
Page 152 The fact that Nägeli wrote at least one handwritten draft of his first response to Mendel before copying the version he mailed is mentioned in Hugo Iltis, Life of Mendel, pp. 190-191.
Page 152 The phrase "mistrustful caution" is from Mendel’s second letter to Nägeli, 18 April 1867, reprinted in Stern & Sherwood, The Origin of Genetics: A Mendel Source Book, p. 61.
Page 152 The quote from Nägeli’s draft response to Mendel is from Hugo Iltis, Life of Mendel, p. 193, in which Iltis quotes from a letter in Carl Correns’s collection of the Mendel-Nägeli correspondence, published, with Correns’s own comments, in Nat. Wochenschrift, 1912, p. 351.
Page 153 Nägeli’s trips to Russia and Paris, and their effect on his health, are described in Hugo Iltis, Life of Mendel, p. 185.
Page 154 Mendel’s defense of his experimental method in his second letter to Nägeli is from the English translation of his letters that appears in Stern & Sherwood, The Origin of Genetics: A Mendel Source Book, pp. 62-63.
Page 154 The quote about Mendel’s "excess avoirdupois" is from Stern & Sherwood, The Origin of Genetics: A Mendel Source Book, p.71. The second quote, about his eagerness for summer, is from p. 77.
Page 156 Mendel’s comment to Nägeli about being elected abbot is from Stern & Sherwood, The Origin of Genetics: A Mendel Source Book, p. 79
Page 156 The reference to Mendel as "a harmless putterer" is from C. W. Eichling, "I talked with Mendel," Journal of Heredity, vol. 33, 243-246, 1942.
Page 156 Mendel’s expression of expectation about his election as abbot is from a letter to his brother-in-law, dated two days before the election, quoted in Hugo Iltis, Life of Mendel, p. 239.
Page 156 The explanation for why men in their forties, rather than older men, were so often elected abbot is from Hugo Iltis, Life of Mendel, p. 47.
Page 157 Focke’s description of Mendel’s paper, and the fate of the book as it made its way from Darwin’s library to George Romanes’s, are discussed in Augustine Brannigan, "The Reification of Mendel," Social Studies of Science, vol. 9, 1979, p. 426.
Page 158 I. F. Schmalhausen’s doctoral dissertation, "O rastitelnych pomesjach – nabljudenija iz petersburskoy flory," 1874, was cited in Vítezslav Orel, Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist, pp. 277-278. The dissertation was also the subject of a paper by A.E. Gaissinovitch, "An early account of G. Mendel’s work in Russia," published in G. Mendel memorial symposium 1865-1965 ( M. Sosna, editor), pp. 39-40, Academia, Prague, 1966.
Page 158 Mendel’s evolving salutations to Nägeli are from his letters, reproduced in Stern & Sherwood, The Origin of Genetics: A Mendel Source Book, p. 80
Page 159 Mendel’s comments about his work with Hieracium are from Hugo Iltis, Life of Mendel, pp. 167-169.
Chapter Thirteen: "My Time Will Come"
Page 161 The quotation from Mendel’s letter to Nägeli about his eye ailment, which he attributes to "my own carelessness," is from Stern & Sherwood, The Origins of Genetics: A Mendel Source Book, pp. 86-87.
Page 162 The list of skittle players who came to the monastery on a typical Sunday is from Hugo Iltis, Life of Mendel, p. 273.
Page 162 The items in Mendel’s coat of arms, and their meaning, are from Anna Matalová, "Mendel’s experimental plants decorate the Augustinian library ceiling." Folia Mendeliana, vol. 20, pp. 5, 1985, and from a personal interview with Matalová in May 1999.
Page 163 Description of the ceiling designs in the monastery library are from Vítezslav Orel, Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist, p. 265, and from a visit to the library, accompanied by Anna Matalová, in May 1999.
Page 163 The description of the effect of the tornado on Mendel’s living quarters is from Vítezslav Orel, Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist, p. 246. And it probably was not so surprising that, as he watched the storm from his study window, the tornado appeared to move in a clockwise direction. As Bob Donaldson, physics teacher at Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, points out, any object moving in a counter-clockwise direction, like a tornado in the northern hemisphere, would appear to be moving clockwise when seen from below.
Page 163 Mendel’s careful description of the two-coned tornado included a high level of detail, as recorded in Hugo Iltis, Life of Mendel, p. 230: "The lower cone had its base upon the ground, its axis being directed vertically upward so that the blunted points of the two cones came together. The upper cone and also the cloud masses surrounding its base were of a very dark, almost black tint, not unlike one of those columns of smoke that can sometimes be seen rising from a factory chimney when the air is perfectly calm and very damp, so that the smoke expands as it rises to form an almost regular cone. The lower cone had a grayish-brown tint, becoming darker from the apex towards the base. A rotation of the column around its vertical axis was plainly visible."
Page 165 The story of Mendel’s decade-long fight over the monastery tax is detailed in Hugo Iltis, Life of Mendel, in a chapter called "The Struggle for the Right," pp. 253-272.
Page 165 The lord lieutenant’s estimate of the state of Mendel’s mental health is from Hugo Iltis, Life of Mendel, p. 257. Mendel’s rejoinder appears on p. 260.
Page 166 The list of honorary – yet time-consuming – positions that went along with the role of abbot of the St. Thomas monastery is from Hugo Iltis, Life of Mendel, p. 251.
Page 166 The comment about Mendel’s paranoia, which extended even to his brethren, appeared in a letter written by Anselm Rambousek – the man who would, within the year, succeed him as abbot – to fellow monk Paul Krížkovský on May 8, 1883. In it, Rambousek comments that the abbot had “grown strikingly fatter," and he offers some unkind words about Mendel’s sister Theresia and her "stout" sixteen-year-old daughter, whom he describes as a "walking regular tub." The letter is reprinted in Vítezslav Orel, "Unknown letters relating to Mendel’s state of health," Folia Mendeliana, vol. 6, 1971, pp. 268-269.
Page 167 The change in one of the symbols on Mendel’s abbatical shield, and the reason for it, was described by Anna Matalová during a personal interview in May 1999.
Page 167 The etymology of the various meanings of "wit," and a lengthy discussion of the relationship between humor and genius, can be found in Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation, New York: Dell Publishing, 1973, p. 50.
Page 168 Details about Mendel’s love of jokes, and his beekeeping, are from Anna Matalová, "Mendel’s Personality – Still an Enigma?" in Vítezslav Orel and Anna Matalová (eds.), Gregor Mendel and the Foundation of Genetics, Brno: The Mendelianum of the Moravian Museum, 1983, p. 301.
Page 168 Mendel’s practical joke on Clemens is described in Hugo Iltis, Life of Mendel, pp. 219-220.
Page 169 Eichling’s recollection of his visit with Mendel, and his estimation of the abbot’s local reputation, are from his article, "I talked with Mendel," Journal of Heredity, vol. 33, 1942, pp. 243-246.
Page 169 The description of the "Prelate Mendel" fuchsia is from Hugo Iltis, Life of Mendel, p. 210. The Czech spelling of the breeder’s name, used in some more recent publications, is Tvrdý.
Page 170 An analysis of Mendel’s work with names as a form of mathematical linguistics, which at the time was a new branch of science, appears in Oldrich Ferdinand, “Mendel’s effort to find some mathematical laws in the derivation of names,” Folia Mendeliana v. 1, 1966, pp. 31-34.
Page 170 Mendel’s deathbed scene is described in Robert Olby, Origins of Mendelism, pp. 105-106. Details are from a letter written by Frau Doupovec’s son and published in German in 1963 by J. Sajner.
Page 171 The Brünn Tagesbote obituary for Mendel is quoted in Robert Olby, Origins of Mendelism, p. 106.
Page 171 Niessl’s eulogy is reported in Vítezslav Orel, Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist, p. 274.
Page 171 The ironic – and speedy – resolution to Mendel’s bitter, protracted fight over the monastery tax is from Hugo Iltis, Life of Mendel, pp. 270-272.
Page 172 The Latin lines inscribed on the Augustinian memorial, from Romans chapter 14, verse 8, was translated by Carolyn Rogers.
Page 173 Mendel’s Gutenberg poem translation appears in Iltis, Hugo, Life of Mendel, pp. 36-37. It had no title.
Chapter Fourteen: Synchronicity
Page 178 The quotes from the myth of Demeter are from Geraldine McCaughrean, Greek Myths, illustrated by Emma Chichester Clark, New York: Margaret K. McElderry Books, 1993, p. 15. My neighbor, Jill Feasley, found this lovely illustrated book to read to her young children when she discovered, one evening in early June 1999, a wild evening primrose plant popping open in her front garden. She announced to the whole community, via a neighborhood e-mail listserve, that her evening primroses were putting on a nightly display of synchronicity, and that we were all invited to take part in the magic. For a few splendid weeks that June and July, dozens of us assembled every evening at about 8:30 to watch the fabulous unfurling taking place in Jill’s garden.
Chapter Fifteen: Mendel Redux
Page 179 De Vries’s paper in Comptes Rendus, "Sur la loi de disjonction des hybrides," vol. 130, 1900, pp. 845-847, is translated in part, and paraphrased in other parts, in H. F. Roberts, Plant Hybridization Before Mendel, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1929, pp. 324-326. In it, De Vries describes in detail a crossing of poppy (Papaver somniferum crossed with the Danebrog variety of the same species), makes a chart of his results with 11 species including Lychnis, Oenothera, and Coreopsis, and mentions that he "obtained the same results" with maize hybrids by crossing sweet-kerneled maize with starchy-kerneled.
Page 179 Correns made this comment in a letter to H.F. Roberts, dated 23 January 1925, in response to a request Roberts made, and it was part of the chapter on Correns in Roberts’s book, Plant Hybridization Before Mendel, p. 337. Correns noted, in his own article, that he received De Vries’s Comptes Rendus abstract "through the generosity of the author," who apparently mailed Correns a reprint from his home in Amsterdam. This comment also appears in Plant Hybridization Before Mendel, p. 339.
Page 180 Impressions of Correns’s state of mind come largely from Onno Meijer, who has made a careful study of the events of April 21, 1900, including interviews with members of Correns’s family, which he summarized for me during an interview in Amsterdam in October 1998. Details of his life come from the entry by Robert Olby, "Carl Franz Joseph Erich Correns," in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, pp. 421-423.
Page 180 It was A. H. Sturtevant, in his A History of Genetics, p. 26, who pointed out that Bonnier had read De Vries’s French Academy paper for him. Sturtevant said Bonnier also edited De Vries’s second French rediscovery paper, which appeared in Revue général de botanique on 15 July 1900.
Page 181 The quote about the xenia craze of 1899 is from L. C. Dunn, "Xenia and the origin of genetics," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 117, 1973, p. 105.
Page 182 Isaac Newton’s quote about standing on the shoulders of giants is so well known to scientists and science historians as to be almost taken for granted. For that reason, every time I have seen it mentioned, it has been without a citation – which makes me uncomfortable attributing it to Newton with absolute certainty. One of the recent authors to allude to this quote (capitalizing the word Giants, supposedly as a nod toward the large intellect and small stature of one of Newton’s scientific contemporaries) is Jonathan Weiner, The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in our Time, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994, p. 4.
Page 183 Much of the information about De Vries was collected during a research trip to Amsterdam in October 1998, which included an interview with Onno Meijer of the Free University of Amsterdam, a tour of the Hortus Botanicus where De Vries worked for many years, and a jaunt around De Vries’s neighborhood near the Botanical Institute. It also comes from conversations with Bob Olby of the University of Pittsburgh, Lindley Darden of the University of Maryland, and various readings, especially Meijer’s "Hugo De Vries No Mendelian?" Annals of Science, vol. 42, 1985, pp. 189-232.
Page 184 A novel about homosexual love that came out in 1903, called Pijpelijntjes, caused a huge anti-gay backlash throughout the Netherlands. The year Pijpelijntjes appeared was also the year that Stomps came to work for De Vries, as described in Onno Meijer, "Hugo De Vries und Johann Gregor Mendel: Die Geschichte einer Verneining," Folia Mendeliana, vol. 21, 1986, pp. 69-90. The book’s appearance, and possibly the proximity of Stomps, caused De Vries such emotional pain that when he was offered a chance to move to the United States to teach in the fruitfly laboratory of Thomas Hunt Morgan at Columbia University, he seriously considered it. What kept De Vries in Holland was the decision of the board of directors of the Hortus Botanicus to build De Vries his own institute. This new institute kept him in Amsterdam for the rest of his working life.
Page 185 De Vries’ summary of his mutation theory is from Robert Olby, Origins of Mendelism, p. 112, quoting from De Vries’s Dutch paper, "Erfelijke monstrositeiten in den ruilhandel der botanische tuinen," Bot. Jaarbock, vol. 9, 1898, pp. 62ff.
Page 185 De Vries’s definition of "intracellular" as non-nuclear is from Robert Olby, Origins of Mendelism, p. 111.
Page 186 Quotes from De Vries’s presentation of July 1899, and a comparison between that lecture and an article he had published two years earlier, comes from Alain Corcos and Floyd Monaghan, "Role of De Vries in the recovery of Mendel’s work. I. Was De Vries really an independent discoverer of Mendel?" Journal of Heredity, vol. 76, pp. 187-190, 1985. De Vries’s 1899 lecture was reprinted the following year as "Hybridizing of Monstrosities" in the Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society, vol. 24, 1900, pp. 69-75.
Page 187 The phrase Bateson used in his RHS lecture to describe the pace of evolution -- "it is going at a gallop!" – is from Beatrice Bateson, William Bateson, FRS, Naturalist, p. 165.
Page 187 William Bateson made his comments about De Vries in a letter to Beatrice written from Cambridge, where De Vries was staying with Bateson just before the London meeting. It is quoted in William B. Provine, The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1971, p. 66, and also in Robert Olby, Origins of Mendelism, p. 115.
Page 187 The text of Bateson’s speech before the International Conference on Hybridization appears in Bateson, Beatrice, William Bateson, FRS, Naturalist, pp. 166 ff.
Page 188 R. A. Rolfe’s reference to Mendel at the International Conference on Hybridization was mentioned by Robert Olby in Origins of Mendelism, p. 232.
Page 189 The wording of De Vries’s footnote is from the translation of his article that appears in Stern & Sherwood, The Origin of Genetics: A Mendel Source Book, p. 110, and that is cited by Robert Olby in Origins of Mendelism, p. 116.
Page 190 Correns’s quote is from Stern & Sherwood, The Origin of Genetics; A Mendel Sourcebook, p. 120.
Page 190 De Vries’s switch from his old terminology, active and latent, to the Mendelian terminology, dominant and recessive, after the rediscovery, was pointed out by Onno Meijer, "Hugo De Vries no Mendelian?" p. 192.
Page 190 The reason that such a small percentage of Correns’s maize hybrids exhibited a Mendelian ratio was not elucidated until two years later, when Correns discovered the phenomenon of selective fertilization. He found that an egg cell carrying the recessive sugary trait was less likely to be fertilized by pollen with the same trait than by pollen carrying the dominant starchy trait. This was later found to be related to the growth of the pollen tube, which can be affected by the genes it contains. Correns’s work on this is described in L. C. Dunn, A Short History of Genetics: The Development of Some of the Main Lines of Thought, 1864-1939, Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1991, p. 102.
Page 191 The story of the gene for colorlessness, and its confounding results in some of Correns’s pea experiments, is from A. H. Sturtevant, A History of Genetics, p. 29.
Page 191 The summary of Correns’ interpretation of Mendel’s paper comes from Alain F. Corcos and Floyd V. Monaghan, "Correns, an independent discoverer of Mendelism? II. Was Correns a real interpreter of Mendel’s paper?" Journal of Heredity, vol. 78, pp. 404-405, 1987. Information about Correns, some of it conjectural but much of it based on lengthy readings of Correns’s work and interviews with his descendents, also was provided by Onno Meijer in an interview in Amsterdam, October 1998.
Page 192 Correns’s failure to differentiate between the law of segregation and the law of independent assortment, both of which he attributed to Mendel, was pointed out by Corcos and Monaghan, "Correns, an independent discoverer of Mendelism?" p. 405.
Page 192 Correns’s quote is about the lightened labor of the rediscoverers is from H. F. Roberts, Plant Hybridization Before Mendel, p. 337.
Page 192 Miescher’s story is told in several places, but it is told best by Alfred E. Mirsky in "The Discovery of DNA," Scientific American, v. 218, no. 6, 1968, pp. 78-88. Mirsky says (on page. 81) that Miescher considered it essential to keep his laboratory space cold to make nuclein easier to work with. His long hours – usually from five in the morning until late at night – spent toiling in unheated rooms through the fall and winter have been blamed for his early death.
Page 193 The first, and still most compelling, dismissal of Erich von Tschermak as a true rediscoverer appeared in Stern & Sherwood, The Origins of Genetics: A Mendel Source Book. The authors dismiss Tschermak early, in the foreword, on page xi.
Page 194 A new look at William Bateson’s actions and reading material in late April and early May 1900 – as well as details about the exhibits and visitors at the RHS Temple Gardens Flower Show – can be found in Robert Olby’s myth-busting article, "Bateson’s Introduction of Mendelism to England: A Reassessment," British Journal of the History of Science, vol. 20, 1987, pp. 399-420. On p. 403, Olby quotes The Times of London, 24 May 1900, p. 14C, an account written the day after the exhibition.
Page 197 The quote about the misuse of statistics is from the preface to William Bateson, Mendel’s Principles of Heredity: A Defence. Placitas, NM: Genetics Heritage Press, 1996, facsimile of original published in Cambridge by Cambridge University Press, 1902, p. x.
Page 197 Tschermak’s assessment of De Vries’ motivation for dismissing Mendel is made in Erich Tschermak, "The rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s work," Journal of Heredity, vol. 42, 1951, pp. 163-171.
Page 197 De Vries’s plea to Bateson that he not "stop at Mendel" is from a letter dated 30 October 1901, which is cited in William Provine, Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics, p. 68.
Chapter Sixteen: The Monk’s Bulldog
Page 199 The British Association, the preeminent society for scientists in the United Kingdom, was founded in 1831. Its early history is documented in Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1981. Bateson’s presidential address before section D, zoology, of the British Association, August 18, 1904, was reprinted in Nature, vol. 70, no. 1817, August 25, 1904, p. 406.
Page 200 The juiciest details of the showdown between Bateson and the biometricians during the British Association meeting are from R. C. Punnett, "Early Days of Genetics," Heredity vol. 4, 1950, p. 7.
Page 202 Tennis as a battlefield metaphor was an important part of Nicholas Mosley’s creation of his Bateson-like character in his novel Hopeful Monsters, London: Minerva, 1991. The quote is from page 47.
Page 202 Descriptions of Miss Saunders’s experiments in the "allotment garden" in Cambridge appear in Robert Olby, Origins of Mendelism, p. 125.
Page 203 Darbishire’s plaintive letter to Bateson, dated 27 May 1904 and found in the Bateson papers at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, is cited by William Provine in Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics, p. 79.
Page 204 Weldon’s anti-Mendelian speech was quoted in William Provine in Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics, p. 79, based on a summary printed in Nature, vol. 70, p. 539, 1904. The audience member’s reaction to it was recollected by R. C. Punnett in "Early Days of Genetics," pp. 7-8.
Page 204 These insights into why Bateson took up chess-playing and cigar-smoking are from David Lipset, Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980, p. 37. His motivation for subscribing to The Flying Leaves, which his wife said he read from aloud "to improve his colloquial German, and to acquire a sense of their humour," is described in Beatrice Bateson, William Bateson, FRS, Naturalist, p.13.
Page 205 Details about Bateson’s experiences at St. John’s College appear in "William Bateson: In Memoriam," The Eagle (St. John’s College magazine), vol. 44, no. 197, April 1926, p. 3.
Page 206 Bateson feeling like Weldon’s bottle-washer is from one of the recollections made by R. C. Punnett in his article, "Early Days of Genetics," p. 2.
Page 207 Bateson’s letter to his mother about the "wooden ship" of morphology was written on 22 November 1886, on another field trip he took to study the plant life of the lakes of Kazalinsk in West Central Asia. It appears in Beatrice Bateson, William Bateson, FRS, Naturalist, p. 20.
Page 207 Details of Weldon’s life are from the long obituary written in the days after his death in April 1906 by his dear friend Karl Pearson and published in the journal they edited together, Biometrika, that October (vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 1-52).
Page 208 Bateson’s complaint to his sister about his brain boiling with evolution is from a letter dated 2 September 1888, and quoted in Beatrice Bateson’s William Bateson, FRS, Naturalist, p. 38.
Page 208 Galton, as Bob Olby and others have pointed out, was something of an anomaly in this divide: he saw a role for both continuous and discontinuous variation, providing statistical evidence for both blending and non-blending inheritance. In fact, both sides in the debate claimed him as a spiritual leader – and Galton did not reject the opprobrium from either side.
Page 209: I did not count how many cases Bateson presented in his Materials book; the "nearly 900" I mention here are derived from the number used by Will Provine, who on page 43 of The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics says Bateson presented exactly 886 such cases.
Page 209 Bateson’s comment about Weldon’s urge to destroy him, made in a letter to his wife three days after Weldon’s death, is reprinted in Beatrice Bateson, William Bateson, FRS, Naturalist, p. 102.
Page 210 The explanation for the breakup of Bateson’s engagement to Caroline Beatrice Durham is from David Lipset, Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist, pp. 28-29.
Page 210 The "cineraria controversy" first reared its head on the pages of Nature in 1895. Quotes from that controversy repeated here are from vol. 51, 1895, p. 607, and vol. 52, 1895, p. 29.
Page 211 Weldon’s last letter to Bateson is quoted in William Provine, The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics, p. 47.
Page 211 The back-and-forth between Bateson and Thiselton-Dyer, summarized in William Provine, The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics, pp. 47-48, played itself out in volume 52 of Nature on p. 79 and, finally, on p. 104.
Page 212 The short story that Caroline Beatrice Durham published in order to win William Bateson’s heart was called "At a conversazione," and appeared in The English Illustrated Magazine, September 1895, p. 551. Bateson’s feverish note of 2 April 1896 in response to finally reading it is quoted by David Lipset in Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist, pp. 29-30.
Page 213 The Rupert Brooke poem, called "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester," is from Brooke, Rupert, Collected Poems, New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1915, pp. 161-165.Page 214 The story of why the church clock’s hands are frozen at ten till three is from Darwin Porter Darwin and Danforth Prince, Frommer’s England, New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1999, p. 534.
Page 214 Bateson’s letter offering a job to R. C. Punnett, dated 25 December 1903, is quoted in Beatrice Bateson, William Bateson, FRS, Naturalist, pp. 85-86.
Page 215 The common British usage of the word "punnett" was mentioned by Bateson biographer Rosemary Harvey of the John Innes Centre in Norwich, England, during an interview in October 1998.
Page 215 The story of the origin of the Punnett Square is from Lawrence C. Davis, "Origin of the Punnett Square," The American Biology Teacher, 55:4, pp. 209-212, and from Robert F. Weaver and Philip W. Hedrick, Genetics, Third Edition, Dubuque, IA: William C. Brown Publishers, 1997, pp. 26-27.
Page 216 Punnett described the cramped working conditions of Bateson’s Grantchester operation in "Early Days of Genetics," p. 5.
Page 217 Bateson’s comments about Miss Saunders’s uncharacteristic behavior with De Vries were made in a letter to Beatrice, now housed in the archives of the John Innes Foundation at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, England. My thanks to Elizabeth Stratton, archivist, for retrieving the letter, dated 8 July 1899.
Page 218 Beatrice Bateson’s comments about her husband’s work schedule, and the role she played in it, were made in William Bateson, FRS, Naturalist, pp. 62-63.
Page 219 Details about the making of entries into the "Dead Book" are from Punnett, "Early Days of Genetics," p. 6.
Page 220 Bateson’s 1902 criticism of Weldon, and his misunderstanding of Mendelism, is from William Bateson, Mendel’s Principles of Heredity: A Defence, facsimile of 1902 Cambridge University Press edition published in Placitas, NM: Genetics Heritage Press, 1996. The designation of Weldon’s argument as one "based on exceptions" is from p. 183; Bateson’s dismissal of the argument is from p. 136; his projection of the ultimate importance of Mendel’s work is from p. 208.
Page 220 Stebbing’s final comments at the British Association meeting are recalled by R. C. Punnett in "Early Days of Genetics," pp. 7-8.
Chapter Seventeen: A Death in Oxford
Page 221 The story of Weldon, Hurst, and The Stud Book is told most colorfully by Will Provine in The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics, pp. 87-88, and Karl Pearson’s obituary of Weldon in Biometrika, vol. 5, no. 1, 1906.
Page 222 Bateson’s evaluation of Hurst was recalled by R. C. Punnett in "Early Days of Genetics," p. 8.
Page 222 Weldon’s reaction to his difficulty finding The Stud Book is told in Pearson’s Biometrika obituary. The incident with the librarian is offered as evidence of Weldon’s wit – but it can also be taken to be an indication of Weldon’s fiery temper.
Page 223 Hurst’s announcement, "Ben Battle never ran as a chestnut," came in the form of a "welcome telegram" to Bateson, as recalled by R. C. Punnett in "Early Days of Genetics," p. 9.
Page 223 Pearson told Hurst about Weldon’s outrage over the wording of Hurst’s footnote shortly after Weldon’s death. Hurst repeated Pearson’s comments to Bateson less than a month later, in a letter dated 9 May 1906. This letter is among the Bateson papers at the American Philosophical Society archives, BPB 21.
Page 223 Details of Weldon’s last days, and his comment about not being able to "leave this thing unsettled," are from Pearson’s long obituary, "Walter Frank Raphael Weldon, 1860-1906," Biometrika, vol. 5, 1906, p. 48
Page 225 Among the legends that accumulated around Bateson, not only that he had shot a man in Russia and that he had also murdered Weldon, was that he had once owned a bulldog of whom he was very fond and had given him away to a porter at Waterloo Station. These stories are retold in David Lipset, Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist, p. 27.
Page 226 Bateson made his comments about Weldon to his wife in a letter he wrote to her on 16 April 1906, which she quotes in her book William Bateson, FRS, Naturalist, p. 102. The second half of his musings is from another letter written "at this time," which she quotes on p. 103.
Page 226 Punnett recalled his regret over the loss of the "spice" of controversy after Weldon’s death in "Early Days of Genetics," p. 9.
Chapter Eighteen: Inventing Mendelism
Page 227 Bateson’s linguistic abilities are described in Beatrice Bateson, William Bateson, FRS, Naturalist, pp. 12-13.
Page 228 The letter in which Bateson first used the word "genetics," written to Professor Adam Sedgwick when he asked Bateson to draw up a scheme for an endowed institute "for the Study of Heredity and Variation," was written on 18 April 1905, and reprinted in Beatrice Bateson, William Bateson, FRS, Naturalist, p. 93.
Page 228 Bateson’s description of his reception in New York is from Beatrice Bateson, William Bateson, FRS, Naturalist, p. 81.
Page 229 Bateson’s speech before the "Third" International Conference on Genetics on 31 July 1906 is quoted in Hurst, Rona, "The R.H.S. and the Birth of Genetics," Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society, 1950, p. 389.
Page 229 The oddity of calling this the third international conference on genetics when it was really the first to use the word genetics in its title was pointed out with glee by Will Provine in a personal interview, August 1998. L.C. Dunn also mentions the anomaly in A Short History of Genetics: The Development of Some of the Main Lines of Thought, 1864-1939, pp. 68-69.
Page 229 Bateson’s four new terms were introduced in a short paragraph in his first report to the Evolution Committee of the Royal Society in 1902. This report is summarized in Elof Axel Carlson, The Gene: A Critical History, Philadelphia and London: W. B. Saunders Company, 1966, p. 13.
Page 230 According to Elof Carlson, writing in The Gene: A Critical History (p. 14), Bateson originally used the unadorned letters P for parents and F for children, beginning his numbering only with the P2 (grandparents) or F2 (grandchildren) generations. The designation of 1’s to signify the first generations was only added later.
Page 230 Ideas about the deification of Mendel into a larger-than-life "father of genetics" come from several sources, including Jan Sapp, "The Nine Lives of Gregor Mendel," in Le Grand, H.E., Experimental Inquiries, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990, pp. 137-166 (downloaded version on MendelWeb), and Augustine Brannigan, "The Reification of Mendel," Social Studies of Science, vol. 9, 1979, pp. 423-454. In this section, I have relied on these papers, as well as on personal interviews, especially with Will Provine of Cornell University (August 1998), Onno Meijer of the Free University of Amsterdam (October 1998), and Jim Secord of Cambridge University (October 1998).
Page 231 The letter from America written to Beatrice is quoted in her book William Bateson, FRS, Naturalist, p. 110.
Page 232 A description of Cuénot’s experiments with yellow mice, and the alternative explanations for his surprising 2:1 ratio, appear in Lindley Darden, Theory Change in Science: Strategies from Mendelian Genetics, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 98-107.
Page 232 The often-repeated dictum "once crossed, always mixed" attributed to Morgan was mentioned by Bentley Glass, a historian of science from Johns Hopkins University, in his description of some of the contents of the Hurst Collection of genetics papers donated by Bateson associate C. C. Hurst and housed at the Cambridge University Library (with copies in the history of genetics library of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia). The phrase was quoted in a letter from Morgan to C. B. Davenport, at the time director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. According to Glass, "Morgan’s doubts and his complex effort to concoct a scheme that would explain the `impurity’ of yellow mice are made much clearer in these letters to Davenport, which show that Morgan’s doubts lasted well past 1905. He was still writing to Davenport in 1907 about the yellow mice, the improbability of Cuénot’s explanation in Mendelian terms, and the impurity or latency of coat colors."
Page 233 Bob Olby raised the matter of Bateson’s superior attitude toward Morgan during an interview at his home in Pittsburgh, January 1999.
Page 233 The quotes from Bateson’s letters to Beatrice about his opinion of Thomas Hunt Morgan are from A. G. Cock’s article in the Mendel Newsletter (no. 14, June 1977, Philadelphia:American Philosophical Society) about the Bateson papers. The collected letters and other documents were unearthed from the summer home in Hancock, New Hampshire of Bateson’s granddaughter, Mary Catherine Bateson (the daughter of Bateson’s youngest son, Gregory, and his wife Margaret Mead, both of whom were anthropologists); catalogued by William Coleman, a Bateson scholar at Johns Hopkins University; and on the verge of being moved to Cambridge University for permanent archival storage. The Bateson papers remain in Cambridge today.
Page 234 The history of the discovery of the chromosome is told briefly in Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance, pp. 673-675.
Page 234 Sutton’s quote, from his paper "On the morphology of the chromosome group of Brachystola magna, Biological Bulletin, vol. 4, 1902, pp. 24-39, is cited in Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, p. 748. A paper Sutton published the following year in the Biological Bulletin (vol. 4, 1903, pp. 231-251) is where he laid out his theory; it was called "The chromosomes in heredity." That same year, Theodor Boveri published an article on the same subject: "Über die Konstitution der chromatischen Kernsubstanz" ["On the individuality of the chromosomes"], Verh. der phys. med. Ges. Würzburg, pp. 10-33, leading to the two men sharing credit for the creation of the chromosome theory of heredity.
Page 235 Boveri’s list from the early 1900s of how many chromosome pairs were found in each species is from Hugo Iltis, Life of Mendel, p. 286. The (slightly) updated numbers are from Grassé, Pierre, ed., Traité de Zoologie, Paris: Masson, 1948.
Page 236 The development of the Sutton-Boveri Chromosome Hypothesis is described in Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance, pp. 747-749.
Page 236 The letter in which Bateson described his "vibratory theory" to his sister Anna is quoted in Beatrice Bateson, William Bateson, FRS, Naturalist, p. 44. According to his wife, he was still writing excitedly about the vibratory theory as late as 1924 – years after he had publicly accepted the Sutton-Boveri chromosome hypothesis.
Page 237 Thomas Hunt Morgan’s objection to the chromosome theory of inheritance is from his paper "Chromosomes and Heredity," American Naturalist, vol. 44, pp. 449-496, 1910. The quote is from p. 467.
Page 238 Morgan’s quote about the failure of his hypothesis explaining Cuénot’s two-to-one ratio is from Morgan, Thomas H., "The influence of heredity and of environment in determining the coat colors in mice," New York Academy of Science Annals, vol. 21, 1911d, p. 95.
Page 238 The story of the quernica virus infection that plagued Bateson’s Daturas in 1899 – the same virus that caused similar anomalous results in Charles Naudin’s attempts at hybridization more than thirty years earlier – was described in Olby, Robert, Origins of Mendelism, pp. 64-65.
Page 239 Bateson’s grudging acceptance of the chromosome theory, are from a letter to an old friend and fellow anti-Morganist Clifford Dobell written in 1924 and quoted in Cock, A.G., "William Bateson’s rejection and eventual acceptance of chromosome theory," Annals of Science, vol. 40, 1983, p. 24.
Page 239 These terms, all listed on p. 17 of Carlson, Elof Axel, The Gene: A Critical History, were proposed, respectively, by Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, Carl von Nägeli, Hugo De Vries, J. Weisner, Oskar Hertwig, and August Weismann.
Page 239 Johannsen’s quote, from his paper "Elemente der Exakten Erblichkeitslehre," G. Fischer, Jena, 1909, appears in translation in Carlson, Elof Axel, The Gene: A Critical History, Philadelphia and London: W. B. Saunders, 1966, pp. 20-22.
Page 241 The story about Morgan and the milk bottles, which might be apocryphal, was repeated as a "legend" in Jonathan Weiner, Time, Love, Memory: A great biologist and his quest for the origins of behavior, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999, p. 22.
Page 241 A summary of De Vries’ mutation theory is from Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance, pp. 546-547. Strangely, among the hundred or so plant species De Vries had collected near his laboratory in Amsterdam, only a single one seemed to be "mutable": the evening primrose, Oenothera lamarckiana.
Page 242 Thomas Hunt Morgan’s conversation with Lilian after their child was born is related in Weiner, Time, Love, Memory, p. 23.
Page 243 A discussion of the different meanings of "mutation," as employed by Hugo De Vries and Thomas Hunt Morgan, is found in Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance, pp. 742-744 and 752-753.
Page 244 One of the laboratories involved in the race to map the human genome, Celera Genomics Corp. of Rockville, Maryland, announced in September 1999 that it had successfully read, or sequenced, the full genetic code of Drosophila melanogaster. Drosophila has traditionally been thought to have about 12,000 genes, but Celera scientists now say it could be as much as 40 percent more. Their 1999 accomplishment was described in Justin Gillis, "Mapping the future: Maryland firm marks genetic code milestone," The Washington Post, September 10, 1999, p. E1.
Page 245 The order of discovery for the first three mutants in Morgan’s lab is from Dunn, L.C. A Short History of Genetics, p. 139.
Page 245 The list of weird Drosophila mutation names, and their explanations, are scattered throughout Jonathan Weiner’s book Time, Love, Memory: A great biologist and his quest for the origins of behavior.
Page 246 Bateson made his comment about the need to make a new start in midlife in a letter to Charles Davenport, 1 January 1910, housed in the Davenport files at the American Philosophical Society.
Chapter Nineteen: A Statue in Mendelplatz
Page 247 The confusion over Bateson’s clothing at the ceremony seemed to have been a confusion over translation. In a letter to Beatrice from Berlin on 26 September 1910, en route to Brünn, he writes about the "rather vexing" problem with the costume. Apparently when he was told to wear "Gehrock," he assumed it meant "my grey suit." But, as he realized when watching a play in Berlin, "Einsame Menschen," in which a character arrives in "Frock," both Frock and Gehrock mean the same thing, frock coat, "which is absurd." Having brought the wrong suit, Bateson sent for his own frock coat – which arrived at precisely ten on the morning of the unveiling, too late for him to change into it. Following the suggestion of his hosts, he appeared at the ceremony wearing formal clothes instead.
Page 248 Bateson’s letter to Beatrice, housed at the Cambridge University library, is reproduced and annotated in A. G. Cock, "Bateson’s Impressions at the Unveiling of the Mendel Monument at Brno in 1910," Folia Mendeliana, vol. 17, 1982, pp. 217-223. He blamed Beatrice for his clothing, saying she hadn’t taken the trouble to read the letter from Hans Pribram, the Viennese biologist, who had written to advise Bateson on the conventions of Continental dress. The frock coat Bateson had frantically sent for arrived in Brünn just as the Catholic mass that opened the ceremony was getting underway -- too late to do him any good.
Page 249 Mendel’s student’s recollection of his teacher’s facial features is from Hugo Iltis, Life of Mendel, p. 89.
Page 249 An analysis of Bateson’s reaction to the Mendel statue unveiling can be found in A. G. Cock, "Bateson’s impressions at the unveiling of the Mendel monument at Brno in 1910." Among other things, he points out the slights made by the Germans to the Czech majority in the lengthy annotations he makes of Bateson’s letters home.Page 252 The letter to one Professor Went, in which De Vries declined an invitation to attend the Mendel centennial celebration on 14 September 1922, is quoted in Onno Meijer, "The Essence of Mendel’s Discovery," Vítezslav Orel and Anna Matalová, (eds.), Gregor Mendel and the Foundation of Genetics, p. 135.
Page 253 The confusion among the citizens of Brünn over just what it was that Mendel "left" the town was noted in Hugo Iltis, Life of Mendel, p. 312.
Page 253 Hugo Iltis’s summary of the true monument to Mendel’s work appears in his Life of Mendel, p. 311.
Page 254 The fruitfly-boiling order from Trofim Lysenko is described in Robert F. Weaver and Philip W. Hedrick, Genetics, Third Edition, Dubuque, IA: William C. Brown, 1997, p. 572.
Page 254 The many movements of the Mendel statue under cover of darkness in 1950 and 1964 were relayed by Anna Matalová during a personal interview in May 1999.