When they talk about Mendel, we learn that he was a monk!

There have been hundreds (probably thousands) of books written about Darwin and his life. There are less than a dozen books devoted to Mendel, his work and his life, and none of the ones I have read so far talk much about what it was like to live and work in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 19th Century.

In this story I have tried to compensate for this omission. As you have read (or about to read) in this tale, the year that Mendel published his paper on Plant Hybridization was a very dramatic one. His country had just lost it's sham of a constitution, it's army was technologically and sociologically backwards, there were legions of state informers that reported any opposition to the State and the Emperor, police kept secret files on Czech monks (Klacel had a big one!), and all newspapers were censored.

(Incidentally, the story of newspaper censorship, how it worked and the 'stamp' that had to be stuck on every paper sold, is all true. It was reported by no less an authority than Mark Twain after a visit to Austria in the late 19th century).

Austrian leaders were also making a mess of it's foreign policy. They had lost the leadership of the German Confederation, were not part of the 'free trade area' (Zollverien), were surrounded by enemies (France, Prussia and Italy), could not resolve the 'Duchies' issue, and were being manipulated into a war! How bad can it get?

Historians argue about when the Czechs arrived in Moravia and Bohemia, but by the 12th century ethnic Czechs occupied the central plains and were more or less surrounded by German settlements, and occupied by German towns founded in the 13th century by various Kings of Bohemia.

It was an uneasy alliance that was repeatedly put under tension. In Mendel's time ethnic Czech Nationalism was rampant, although, as pointed out in this story, it was not necessarily the kind of nationalism we would recognize today. Never the less, the authorities took it very seriously and vigorously suppressed any challenges to its rule.

War, ethnic tensions, authoritarian government, informers, censorship and an absence of democracy was the daily environment in which Mendel lived and worked. The Church was very powerful and ran the schools. Napp was a well connected member of society, so his monks probably lived a quieter life than some of the inhabitants of Brno. But it cannot have been easy.

Yet it was in this environment that Mendel did his best work, and later became a successful Abbot. Did his every day life shape or influence how he though and the kind of scientific thinking he performed? Of course; but in what way?

Mendel's paper on Plant Hybridization broke with a lot of the current traditions of scientific publishing. He ordered 40 reprints (a massive number), so he clearly was proud of his work. These two facts suggest that, beneath a conventional demeanor, Mendel was a bit of a rebel and had every scientist's secret wish to become famous.

He did.

As for the other elements in this story. Mendel had a microscope and very likely looked at pollen, but if he could distinguish between different types of pollen - I do not know. He was most certainly capable of solving a 'mystery' by inductive and deductive logic; he did exactly this in his interpretations of his experiments.

But would Mendel, trained as a deductive and inductive thinker, have made a good detective? Much of this story hinges on that possibility, but could anyone, including Mendel, have made the connection between logic and solving crime?

Interestingly, the 'new' thinking in science that Mendel saw, and was influenced by as an undergraduate, also influenced a young medical student in England. One of his professors lectured on the need for logic, rigorous proof and deductive logic as a way of solving the problems of diagnosis, and understanding medical diseases. The medical student, whose name was Arthur Conan Doyle, later went on to invent a famous fictional detective with just such skills.

All the facts about the nature and functioning of the Austrian Army are true (as far as I've been able to research). Regiments in 1865 did indeed raise a 4th battalion of troops when war loomed, and German boys often purchased exemptions from military service.

The Krautstrunk Beaker was and is real. They still exist and are highly collectable.