Among Friends, Books, and Plants

It is the midsummer of 1866.  Five-thousand Prussian troops move into the city of Brünn (in the present-day Czech Republic) as one step in their invasion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Forcing themselves upon the civilian community, sixteen army officers house themselves at the Abbey of St. Thomas, where ninety-four horses of the military are also moved onto the grounds.  The abbey is required to feed everybody at its own expense.  With the city's sanitation pushed to its limits, cholera breaks out, spreading through the terrified city.  Over six weeks, three-thousand civilians and soldiers die.  And on one of those dark days, observing it all from his window at the abbey, would have been a friar with a now famous name: Gregor Mendel.

This is not the setting in which most books place Mendel.  Almost invariably, they put him in the abbey's seemingly idyllic garden in which Mendel grew his now famous pea plants -- leading to his scientific discovery of the basic patterns of inheritance.  Placing him in that idyllic garden cultivates a contrast between science and stereotyped religion, especially given our modern myth that science and religion have usually been in conflict.  I still remember my own surprise in middle school upon reading in my biology textbook that a "monk" made one of the pivotal discoveries of modern science.


More precisely, the religious order Mendel was part of was a Roman Catholic order of friars (the Augustinian order). That classification meant that its members were more integrated into the surrounding secular community, primarily as teachers, even though in this case living in an abbey.  And the friars of the Abbey of St. Thomas were especially engaged.  The Abbey had a 30,000 volume library with books on botany, horticulture, agriculture, physics, and, of course, theology.  Among Gregor's friar-colleagues were a musical maestro, a Goethe scholar, and a noted philosopher. The head abbot, Cyrill Franz Napp, was current on the latest scientific discoveries. It was in this abbey setting -- more conducive to enlightenment than being surrounded by occupying troops -- that "Mendel found a supportive scientific community," as the contemporary biographer Simon Mawer puts it.

Gregor Mendel was fond of logging statistics on many things, not just his famous pea-plant hybrids.  He also kept data on the weather and astronomy.  His being educated in probability and combinational mathematics doubtlessly encouraged his applying those types of skills to the study of plants.  The data led him to discovery.

Despite the temporary distraction of an occupying army, Mendel's now famous scientific paper on plant hybridization was published that same year of 1866.  It was the culmination of eight years of work, hand-pollinating and logging seven pairs of traits in 28,000 pea plants, their 40,000 flowers, and nearly 400,000 seeds.

May we in our own small ways show determination in wanting to observe and appreciate the world of Nature, even when human conflict and chaos might dishearten us.

~ ~ ~

Have there been friends who have been part of your learning or your appreciating more the world of Nature?

(The quotation by Simon Mawer is taken from 

Gregor Mendel: Planting the Seeds of Genetics, © 2006. p. 30.)
(The drawing of pea plants, Pisum sativum, is from the book Flora von Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz, 1885,
 by Prof. Dr. Otto Wilhelm Thomé, and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

Stepping In... to Step Out into the World

I have met more than one person who very much likes StoryCorps stories, a brief weekly spot on Public Radio's Friday news programs.  The StoryCorps project traveled around the U.S. for years, recording ordinary Americans as they told about pivotal events in their life journeys. Many of what is shared is poignant.  When I take pen to paper to write my own thoughts about a wider world and reading, there is one particular StoryCorps spot that comes to mind.  As I imagine the experience in my mind, it also has to do with Nature.

A woman explained to StoryCorps how a bookmobile became a life-changing experience for her.  As a little girl, she lived with her family in Native American migrant-worker camp.  Traveling so frequently, the girl was not allowed to have books, because they would have been too heavy to move.  But then one day, when the girl was 12, a traveling library (a bookmobile) stopped on its periodic rounds where the family was currently living.  And the girl was invited to step in.

As the now grown woman explained her childhood experience, when first told she could take home a book from the mobile, she wondered what was the catch.  Being told there was none other than returning the book in two weeks, she began to devour books.  And her having stepped (at first hesitantly) into the bookmobile made it possible for her to step into a whole new world. Or perhaps I should say "worlds," because the girl's selections ranged from volcanoes to dinosaurs.

"The Journey" (1903)
by
Elizabeth Shippen Green

The child's stepping into that vehicle filled with books reminded me how each book can become for us a vehicle by which we step into the mind, and maybe the emotions of the author of that book. By so doing, we expand our world, even bringing hope to some corner of our lives where it previously could not be seen.  As the woman explained to StoryCorps, because of those books, "By the time I was 15, I knew there was a world outside of the camps.... I believed I could find a place in it.  And I did."

I am humbled by this story.  Although the family I grew up in was decidedly middle-class, we had a couple of filled bookcases in our house; and my mother periodically purchased an additional book so that our home library might grow as I grew.  I am also humbled because I know that it is upon the often hard lives of migrant workers that I depend for life when I purchase fruits or vegetables at the grocery store.

The StoryCorps project is a radio broadcast, and so I have to provide pictures for the stories with my imagination.  To complete this moving human story, I must picture two things in the background to that bookmobile:  The countless people who wrote those traveling books.  And rows and rows of growing fruits and vegetables -- a hard-earned gift from Nature.

~~~

How have books widened your world?  Has there been a critical experience in your life that has made your life richer than it otherwise would have been?

(The quotation is from "Once Forbidden, Books Become A Lifeline

 For A Young Migrant Worker," by NPR Staff, May 30, 2014, and is used here under Fair Use.)
(The illustration by Green is in the Public 'Domain.)