Catholic Church and health care the retinal image. Gregor Mendel, an Austrian scientist and Augustinian friar, began experimenting with peas around 1856. Mendel had joined the Brno Augustinian Monastery in 1843, but also trained as a scientist at the Olmutz Philosophical Institute and the University of Vienna. The Brno Monastery was a centre of scholarship, with an extensive library and tradition of scientific research. Observing the processes of pollination at his monastery in modern Czechoslovakia, Mendel studied and developed theories pertaining to the field of science now called genetics. Mendel published his results in 1866 in the "Journal of the Brno Natural History Society", and
Johann Karl Nestler stock animals and their offspring Nestler hoped to explain the (genetic history). Examination of the records of the ancestors of the best breeding animals, called by Nestler "developmental history" () was for him the reverse side of the same coin. According to Wood and Orel the search for rules of heredity in sheep created an atmosphere of enquiry about heredity in general, which had influence on later work of Gregor Johann Mendel, himself a student at the Faculty of Philosophy in 1840–43. Nestler was also a very active member of the "Moravian-Silesian Society for Advancement of Agriculture" (, in which