After a light evening meal, he had been on his way back to his room to read the latest letter from Professor Nageli, a frequent correspondent who had expressed an interest in his Pisum work. Later he had intended to go over the notes for his upcoming talk to the Brno Natural Science Society, and practice his delivery. After his failure to impress his colleagues during his first talk, he was determined to do better this time. But these plans were interrupted by his friend Brother Joseph.
"Come with me," Joseph had said, excitedly, "I want to show you something."
Dragging the reluctant monk behind him, Brother Joseph had taken a route past the dormitory rooms, down a flight of stairs, where they had encountered Brother Matthew and taken him along with them, and into the storage rooms behind the kitchen. There, in a dark and dusty corner, he had pointed in triumph to a fallen plate of half eaten meat.
"What?" snorted Brother Matthew.
"Look," insisted Brother Joseph, drawing his two friends closer to the spilt food. "Watch as I lift the plate."
All three monks sank to their knees to observe the phenomenon more closely. Brother Joseph carefully lifted one edge of the dish, which had deep sides and rested on the slate floor upside down. As the plate came up the three monks saw that the joint of meat was mostly eaten, but the juices that had leaked out from the joint when it was hot had now set into a semi-solid jelly. On the surface of this jelly a beautiful mold was growing, and this was what Brother Joseph had brought them to see.
At once the scientific curiosity of the three men kicked in, and they bent to observe the fungus more closely.
"I have never seen a better example," said Brother Gregory. "At University we were shown a variety of molds, of several different genera, but they had all been grown in broth, and their hyphae were fragmented. Here you can see the full microbial form."
"Are those the fruiting bodies?" asked Brother Matthew, pointing to some dark hyphal stalks poking far above the surface.
"I'm not sure," said Brother Joseph. "Like Brother Gregory said, it is extremely rare to see a mold of this genus so complete. In all my studies I have never witnessed the full life cycle. Here," he pointed to the center of the mold, "I suspect this is where the first spore landed." The indicated an area in the center of the threaded mass that was thinner than the rest of the syncicium. Hyphae originating from the spore had spread, like waves on the surface of the pond, moving ever outwards. Now the first hyphae were dying back, and the more vigorous growth was taking place at the edges.
"What did you call these?" Brother Matthew asked, pointing to the fluffy orange threads spreading out across the surface of the meat jelly.
"Most modern microbiologists are starting to use the term 'hypha', at least for the individual threads," Brother Joseph told him. He was the monastery expert on things microbial.
"Some believe that within these threads there is a single continuous strand of protoplasm," Mendel added. Cells, and their role in the structure of living organisms, had been an interest of his since his days at the University of Vienna. There he had fallen under the influence of Professor Unger, a proponent of the new "cell theory".
"If true, it would spoil the theory that all living organisms are made up of vast numbers of individual single cells," Brother Joseph grinned at him, well aware of Mendel's theories.
"Not at all," Mendel huffed indignantly, "it would just be an interesting exception."
"The exception that proves the rule?" Brother Matthew could not help adding. He too liked teasing his brother monk, who could be overly sensitive to criticism.
"Can we move this to a more comfortable location?" Brother Gregory asked, trying to deflect the conversation. His knees were hurting. "I think this specimen deserves a closer inspection, and I would like to find out how to keep it growing this way."
"Why are you two so excited about this particular mold?" Brother Matthew was curious.
"Well," Brother Joseph answered getting to his feet and pointing to the almost circular round of jelly on the floor. "Apart from examples growing in the wild, no mold in a laboratory grows like this."
"When I was in Professor Unger's laboratory," Mendel added, "we tried growing small pieces of mold in broth, using the French method. But that involved boiling a rich broth in a glass vessel, adding the mold after the broth had cooled and then sealing the flask against the outside air."
"Why is that different?"
"In broth," said Brother Joseph, "the flask containing the mold must be shaken regularly - probably to add air to the mixture. This shaking is necessary, but also breaks up the delicate threads of the mold and makes it impossible to see how it grows, or anything about it's morphology."
"Here, on this plate of jelly, you can see exactly how the whole body of the mold is growing, where it started, what the threads are doing, and, if you are right, these could be the fruiting bodies that give rise to the next generation of molds," said Mendel.
"So, if this is a better way of growing these organisms, why don't you?" Brother Matthew wanted to know.
The other two monks just looked at one another. Brother Joseph shrugged, "No one thought of it before," he was forced to say at last.
"So this is indeed a scientific breakthrough?" said Brother Matthew.
"Miracles do sometime happen," laughed Brother Joseph. "Let's see if we can take advantage of it."