Gregor Mendel both his professors at the Palacký University, Olomouc (Friedrich Franz and Johann Karl Nestler), and his colleagues at the monastery (such as Franz Diebl) to study variation in plants. In 1854, Napp authorized Mendel to carry out a study in the monastery's experimental garden, which was originally planted by Napp in 1830. Unlike Nestler, who studied hereditary traits in sheep, Mendel used the common edible pea and started his experiments in 1856. After initial experiments with pea plants, Mendel settled on studying seven traits that seemed to be inherited independently of other traits: seed shape, flower color, seed coat tint,
Order of Saint Augustine the members of the order, but it was the great scientist Johann Gregor Mendel, abbot of the Czech monastery of St. Thomas at Old Brno in Moravia (d. 1884) who gave great credit to the Augustinian Order's scholarship in the 19th century. He was the discoverer of the Mendelian laws of heredity and hybridization. Given that the Roman Catholic Church in the Western world has been experiencing a decline in vocations to the priesthood and religious life since the 1960s, a relatively simple way to assess the vigour of this order is to compare the numbers of those in solemn