ABSTRACT
As previously mentioned, Mendel had stimulating associates, in the monastery at Brünn, seeing that Bratranek and Klacel, who were members of the community, had literary and artistic as well as scientific interests. Apart from this, there was not in Brünn before the year 1862 any focus of scientific research, other than the Werner Society (whose chief occupation was to publish a geological map of Moravia and Silesia) and the natural history section of the Moravian and Silesian Agricultural Society of which Mendel was an active member. In the annual reports of this latter society, reports which Mendel had no doubt carefully studied, there are several papers upon hybridisation, one of them being a paper read in 1850 by Lauer, entitled Concerning a Hybrid of the Pea and the Vetch. None of these papers breathe a markedly scientific spirit, but there can be no doubt that they may have influenced Mendel.
