The men who translated his paper into English in the early 1900s might have been overly generous in their assumptions of what Mendel understood. In their translations Merkmal often became “unit” or “factor” or “determinant.” With twentieth-century hindsight, the translators’ readiness to ascribe to Mendel all sorts of prescient views of heredity through the use of these modern words may have made it seem that Mendel was closer to the concept of a genelike particle than he actually was.