EpilogueHowever, this still did not answer the question of ‘blending’ and the continuation of
inheritance for generation after generation.
The answer to this question lay with an obscure friar living in a monastery in Brno,
Czechoslovakia, who became particularly interested in plant breeding. On 9 October
1843, Gregor Mendel was admitted to the convent of the Augustinians as a novice. He
was familiar with the works of both Darwin and Wallace and a well-marked copy of
On the Origin of Species was later found in his library. He spent eight years from 1856
until 1863 counting the different kinds of offspring from crossing pea plants which
bore either wrinkled or smooth seeds. He followed them through second and third
generations and presented his results in 1865. What Mendel’s experiments showed is
that characteristics inherited from each parent were not blended or lost in a mixing
process, but remained in discrete parcels (or genes) which could then be passed on
to later generations. His findings were published as a forty-four-page article in the
Proceedings of the Scientific Society of Bron in 1866 and were then virtually ignored
for the rest of Mendel’s life.
Mendel’s painstaking research led to the result Darwin was looking for and if
only he had known of his work then Darwin’s argument for the evolution of species
would have been completely convincing. Amazingly, this knowledge lay in Darwin’s
study, for after his death a copy of an 1881 book by Wilhelm Focke called Plant
Hybridization, which cited Mendel’s work, was found in his library with the bound
pages still uncut. It was in 1918 that Ronald Fisher, an English statistician, combined
Mendelian genetics with the theory of natural selection and in 1930 published a book
called The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, which gave natural selection a
mathematical footing and broad scientific consensus.
Darwin died at the age of seventy-four and his funeral took place at Westminster
Abbey on 26 April 1882. Darwin himself had wished for a simple burial at his local
church, close to Down House and next to the burial place of those of his beloved
children who had died in their infancy. For most of his life Darwin was only a nominal
Christian and he later described himself as an agnostic after the invention of that word
by Thomas Huxley. Many of his disciples, including Huxley, campaigned relentlessly
for the high honour of a burial at Westminster Abbey. Huxley argued that ‘In 50 or a
100 years hence it would seem absolutely incredible to people that the state did not
recognize his transcendent services to science’. Darwin had become Britain’s most
prominent scientist and countries including France and Germany had awarded him
their highest honours.
For many it was unthinkable that Darwin be buried in Westminster Abbey. Had not
the Church of England only twenty years earlier described Darwin as ‘The Devil’s
Disciple’? Yet two thousand mourners representing a cross-section of the Victorian
Establishment attended Westminster Abbey for his funeral. Except, that is, for a
few notable absences – Queen Victoria was busy preparing for her son’s wedding,
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