Living as we do in the dying days of the twentieth century we take a lot for granted. We assume that our car will start, that the supermarkets will always be stocked with food, that an antibiotic will always cure us or our ills, and that if we get on board an airplane it will fly. We also assume that somewhere in the background of our lives scientists are working on new and better cures, a better VCR, a more powerful computer and a less polluting automobile. We take the fruits of science and technology for granted.
Apart from some areas of esoteric science, however, the discoveries we are assuming that science is making all belong in the category of 'improvements'. A better VCR builds on the fact that VCR's already exist and can be improved on. A new cure for a disease builds on the fact that antibiotics and immunology are well known phenomena and only need to be perfected. More powerful computers are simply bigger and faster versions of older computers with more whiz and bang for the buck. The great majority of 'modern' science is simply improving on well known principals discovered by 'old' science.
In Mendel's time if was very different. There was no 'old' science and there were few basic principles on which to build or improve. Starting with the industrial revolution in England, which began in the late eighteenth century, gentlemen scientists (virtually all science was a male dominated club) were engaged in discovering the fundamental laws that govern the natural world. Mendel himself discovered the principles of heredity, and as this story shows, others were discovering the laws about atoms, the laws about motion and the laws about energy. It was an exciting time.
As a subject for scientific investigation, energy was just becoming a "hot" topic. Professionals, like Lord Kelvin (William Thomson) and amateurs, like James Prescott Joule, were slowly combining a lot of disparate information into universal 'laws' that all energy transactions obeyed. Original ideas were giving way to a modern synthesis, and Mendel, if he kept up with the literature, could not help but be impressed by the 'laws of thermodynamics' that were being discovered.
In only one area, biology, did matters take longer to develop. In Mendel's time it would have been unlikely that his yeasts and "rods" would be considered "engines" and thus users of energy. Although, some people were starting to develop ideas that one day would unify biology and engineering.
... and Saint Hugh?
An unlikely hero in this story is St. Hugh of Lincoln. How, did the bones of a 12th century English saint end up in a small Brno church? Obviously this part of the story is fiction, as far as I know the bones of the saint never left England, but ...
The 'official' history of Saint Hugh ends on a strange note. Hugh's body was embalmed and carried in procession to Lincoln Cathedral on Saturday November 18, 1200. Pope Honorius III canonized Hugh in 1220 after a series of well attested cures were attributed to his bones and his tomb. Sixty years later the remains of his body were moved to a better shrine in the Angel retro-choir, during which his head fell off and exuded oil. There the body remained until the Reformation and slowly people forgot about him.
The coffin was rediscovered in 1887 and opened. Nothing remained but a faint trace of oil. All the bones had gone!
No one knows what happened to the bones of the Saint. Perhaps we will find out in a subsequent chapter!