The Sheep Breeders' Society in Brno: heredity becomes a subject in its own right
A society in the Moravian town of Brünn (Brno) that gathered sheep breeders around a question, not of breed in general, but of why a trait holds in the offspring. The society set up a breeding register in which the traits and pedigrees of the animals were recorded.
The society was founded in 1814. Brünn was a centre of the woollen industry and the quality of the fleece was worth money. At meetings in 1816-1820 the members argued over the Hungarian Imre Festetics's inbred Mimush sheep: whether to count them freaks of nature, whether the wool would degenerate from the climate, or whether all of it obeyed a rule. In 1819 Festetics printed his 'genetic laws of nature' in the society's journal, using the word 'genetic' long before Bateson.
Abbot Cyrill Napp pushed the argument to the formulation at which practice ends and research begins: what is inherited, and how. Mendel would later emerge from this milieu.
Why this date
The founding year 1814 follows Poczai and co-authors in Philosophies (2021): the society was set up as a branch of the Moravian agricultural society specifically charged with the problems of heredity. The upper bound in the label is 1820, the end of the sharpest debates over Festetics's Mimush sheep and the beginning of the political pressure which, according to the same authors, held the work down until about 1850. Festetics's 'genetic laws of nature' were printed in 1819 in the society's weekly Oekonomische Neuigkeiten und Verhandlungen.
What it grew from
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Bakewell's livestock breeding: in-and-in mating, culling and letting of sires
influenced · Confidence: high
The in-and-in mating procedures worked out by Bakewell at Dishley were carried into the Habsburg monarchy by Ferdinand Geisslern and other sheep breeders who visited England, and it was the dispute over them that made heredity a subject of discussion in its own right in the Brno society.
Dispute: The dispute is not about the transfer of the procedures but about what that transfer owed to Bakewell as a thinker. Wykes (2004) insists that Bakewell published nothing, kept his methods secret and had no reliable progeny test, and Poczai and co-authors (2014) write plainly that he was not a scholar and had no intention of looking for laws of nature: 'he was no academic and certainly had no ambitions to investigate abstract laws of nature'. What crossed to the Continent, then, was a successful practice without a theory, and the question of heredity arose there, out of the need to defend inbreeding against religious and scientific objection.
Link sources
- Péter Poczai, Jorge A. Santiago-Blay, Jiří Sekerák, A. T. Szabó, How Political Repression Stifled the Nascent Foundations of Heredity Research before Mendel in Central European Sheep Breeding Societies, Philosophies 6 (2), 41 (2021)
Inbreeding methods, developed by Robert Bakewell (1725–1795), were also transferred to the Habsburg monarchy by Ferdinand Geisslern (1751–1824) and other members of SBS who visited England.
- Péter Poczai, Jorge A. Santiago-Blay, Jiří Sekerák, A. T. Szabó, How Political Repression Stifled the Nascent Foundations of Heredity Research before Mendel in Central European Sheep Breeding Societies, Philosophies 6 (2), 41 (2021)
Both Nestler and Napp supported inbreeding tracing back to Bakewell and stressed by Festetics.
- Péter Poczai, Neil Bell, Jaakko Hyvönen, Imre Festetics and the Sheep Breeders' Society of Moravia: Mendel's Forgotten "Research Network", PLoS Biology 12 (1), e1001772 (2014) Verified 20 Sep 2026
Such a meeting of minds was unlikely in England, where the eminent naturalist Sir Joseph Banks regarded Bakewell with suspicion, and it would be the application of Bakewell's methods to wool production in Moravia by Ferdinand Geisslern (1751–1824) that would eventually bring them to the attention of a scientifically minded audience.
- Péter Poczai, Neil Bell, Jaakko Hyvönen, Imre Festetics and the Sheep Breeders' Society of Moravia: Mendel's Forgotten "Research Network", PLoS Biology 12 (1), e1001772 (2014) Verified 20 Sep 2026
Influenced by Bakewell's approach—often referred to as "breeding in-and-in"—which had rapidly gained popularity with European breeders interested in fine wool production, Festetics had started to breed sheep in 1803 on his estate in Hungary.
"Verified" means that on that day the quotation was found at the address given, word for word. No date means we have not been able to open the source yet, not that the quotation is wrong.
- Péter Poczai, Jorge A. Santiago-Blay, Jiří Sekerák, A. T. Szabó, How Political Repression Stifled the Nascent Foundations of Heredity Research before Mendel in Central European Sheep Breeding Societies, Philosophies 6 (2), 41 (2021)
What grew out of it
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'Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden': segregation of characters and numerical ratios
influenced · Confidence: medium
The question of heredity was posed in Brno by sheep breeders half a century before Mendel, and historians call their work outright a prelude to his experiments: Mendel came into the monastery of Napp, the man who formulated that question, and attended Diebl's course on agriculture.
Dispute: Two different things are disputed. First: there is no direct documentary evidence that Mendel read Festetics, and the proponents of continuity admit as much, hedging 'whether or not Mendel was aware of Festetics's ideas' (Poczai et al., 2014); only the link through Napp and Diebl, that is through people rather than through a text, is firmly documented. Second: Olby, in 'Mendel no Mendelian?' (1979), argued that Mendel was not working on heredity at all but on the origin of species through hybridization, in which case Napp's question was not his question. Van Dijk and Ellis (Genetics, 2023) state the thesis thus: 'One of the conclusions of Olby (1979), which we investigated here, was that Mendel was not primarily interested in inheritance but in speciation', and reject it: 'little of Olby's views can hold'. A caution: Poczai and Wood with Orel are not fully independent, Orel being a co-author of both lines of work, and Poczai with co-authors published the continuity thesis three times.
Link sources
- Roger J. Wood, Vítězslav Orel, Scientific Breeding in Central Europe during the Early Nineteenth Century: Background to Mendel's Later Work, Journal of the History of Biology 38 (2), 239-272 (abstract) (2005) Verified 20 Sep 2026
Efforts to bring science into early 19th century breeding practices in Central Europe, organised from Brno, the Hapsburg city in which Mendel would later turn breeding experiments into a body of timeless theory, are here considered as a significant prelude to the great discovery.
- Roger J. Wood, Vítězslav Orel, Scientific Breeding in Central Europe during the Early Nineteenth Century: Background to Mendel's Later Work, Journal of the History of Biology 38 (2), 239-272 (abstract) (2005) Verified 20 Sep 2026
Major figures in this development included Abbot Napp, the one who asked this question and who was due to receive Mendel into the monastery in 1843, and Professor Diebl whose lectures on agriculture and natural science at the Brno Philosophical Institute Mendel would attend in 1846.
- Péter Poczai, Jorge A. Santiago-Blay, Jiří Sekerák, A. T. Szabó, How Political Repression Stifled the Nascent Foundations of Heredity Research before Mendel in Central European Sheep Breeding Societies, Philosophies 6 (2), 41 (2021)
Research carried out by members of the SBS provided questions for centuries of experimental analysis and was a perfect prelude to Mendel.
- Péter Poczai, Neil Bell, Jaakko Hyvönen, Imre Festetics and the Sheep Breeders' Society of Moravia: Mendel's Forgotten "Research Network", PLoS Biology 12 (1), e1001772 (2014) Verified 20 Sep 2026
When Mendel turned his attention to inheritance in peas he was not an isolated monk, but rather the latest in a line of Moravian researchers and agriculturalists who had been thinking about inheritance for half a century.
"Verified" means that on that day the quotation was found at the address given, word for word. No date means we have not been able to open the source yet, not that the quotation is wrong.
- Roger J. Wood, Vítězslav Orel, Scientific Breeding in Central Europe during the Early Nineteenth Century: Background to Mendel's Later Work, Journal of the History of Biology 38 (2), 239-272 (abstract) (2005) Verified 20 Sep 2026
Node sources
- Péter Poczai, Jorge A. Santiago-Blay, Jiří Sekerák, A. T. Szabó, How Political Repression Stifled the Nascent Foundations of Heredity Research before Mendel in Central European Sheep Breeding Societies, Philosophies 6 (2), 41 (2021)
However, it was only in 1814 when the branch of the Ackerbaugesellschaft specifically tasked to investigate the problems of heredity was created, usually known as the Sheep Breeders' Society (SBS) (Schafzüchtervereinigung).
- Péter Poczai, Neil Bell, Jaakko Hyvönen, Imre Festetics and the Sheep Breeders' Society of Moravia: Mendel's Forgotten "Research Network", PLoS Biology 12 (1), e1001772 (2014) Verified 20 Sep 2026
Between 1816 and 1819, members of the SBS extensively debated the association of wool traits (color, fitness, density, etc.), and how to effectively combine useful traits in the progeny of crosses.
- Péter Poczai, Jorge A. Santiago-Blay, Jiří Sekerák, Imre Bariska, A. T. Szabó, Mimush Sheep and the Spectre of Inbreeding, Journal of the History of Biology 55 (3), 495-536 (2022) Verified 20 Sep 2026
The exploration of inbreeding in sheep began to be distilled into hereditary principles that culminated in 1819 with Festetics's "laws of organic functions" and "genetic laws of nature," four decades before Gregor Johann Mendel's seminal work on heredity in peas.
- Péter Poczai, Jorge A. Santiago-Blay, Jiří Sekerák, Imre Bariska, A. T. Szabó, Mimush Sheep and the Spectre of Inbreeding, Journal of the History of Biology 55 (3), 495-536 (2022) Verified 20 Sep 2026
For the characteristics of the wool to be properly enumerated and traced in later generations, the members of the association set up a breeding register in which the characteristics and ancestry of the animals were recorded.
- Roger J. Wood, Vítězslav Orel, Scientific Breeding in Central Europe during the Early Nineteenth Century: Background to Mendel's Later Work, Journal of the History of Biology 38 (2), 239-272 (2005) Verified 20 Sep 2026
But the ultimate 'physiological' question about breeding, 'what is inherited and how?,' found no answer.
"Verified" means that on that day the quotation was found at the address given, word for word. No date means we have not been able to open the source yet, not that the quotation is wrong.