Which brought Makyatta back to his original idea: geniuses. "Brother Gregory, time is getting late, perhaps you should pause for a moment and show the class the book you brought from the Monastery."
"Ah, yes," exclaimed Mendel, getting Makyatta's point at once, "the work of Mozart." He turned back to his desk and picked up the valuable book wrapped in green cloth. "As I promised you earlier, we have two treats today; the visit by Herr Makyatta, whom you will agree has added considerably to our lessons, and this." He held up the book of poems with the original score by the boy Mozart in the frontispiece.
Using all his skills as a communicator, Mendel spent the next half an hour not only showing the boys the hand written piece of music, but also explaining to them how it had been produced. He talked about the ingredients that went into producing a work of originality; hard work and a touch of genius. He related the process of discovery as seen in the scientific method, with the intangibles of 'getting a good idea' and the much harder work of proving it.
"In science, as in this piece of music, a human mind - filled with cells - reaches out into its imagination and plucks a random fact or concept or series of notes," Mendel told his class. "What brings these ideas into the mind no one knows, but once lodged, they germinate and grow in the fertile soil of application. Without the skills honed by constant effort, all these good ideas would just die."
He pointed to Mozart's notes. "At one point, this music was all in Mozart's head, but probably not in the form we see here. In a less well disciplined mind, these notes would have vanished as soon as they were created, but Mozart's father had seen to it that the young Wolfgang practiced his craft day after day, many hours at a time. As a result of all this hard practice, young Mozart had the necessary skills to translate the ephemeral medium of human thought into the hard, cold reality of ink on this page - the music became real."
"Boys," he said, putting the book back in its protective cover, "you must try harder. The harder you work at something the better you become. If Mozart had not had his inborn abilities he would have still been a great piano player, just from the amount of practice he performed each day. Everyone has his own potentials, my own work suggests that you inherit these potentials, but without hard work, you will never amount to anything."