THE PHILIPPINE 



Journal of Science 



C. Botany 

 Vol. XI JULY, 1916 No. 4 



NATURAL SELECTION AND THE DISPERSAL OF SPECIES 



By Edwin Bingham Copeland 



(From the College of Agriculture, University of the Philippines, 



Los Banos, P. I.) 



We all cherish and esteem the truth. Those of us engaged in 

 educational work and in scientific pursuits are devoted to the 

 discovery, understanding, and promulgation of the truth, but 

 our effectiveness in this work is somewhat qualified by individual 

 and general peculiarities of mental equipment. Aside from the 

 individual extremes of attitude, such as, on the one hand, that 

 of the man who has such confidence in the stability of the truth 

 that he trusts it to rise triumphant after every assault, and, 

 on the other hand, that of the miser who treats it as one 

 famous miser did his cheese, as something too precious to be 

 exposed to the light, there is a very general disposition, based 

 on the common love of novelty and contempt for the familiar, 

 to value truth in proportion as it is unknown, unfamiliar, or 

 unaccepted. The bizarre always attracts attention. Nobody 

 publishes the fact that two equal two, or that two plus two 

 equal four ; and the demonstration that the square on the hypoth- 

 enuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two 

 sides of a right-angled triangle would attract no attention and 

 is only published in elementary geometries. On the other hand, 

 a plausible argument against the last proposition would be 

 published and widely circulated and would attract considerable 

 attention, even if it were not believed. No one pays any 

 attention to the accepted fact that parallel lines will not meet, 

 but a geometry based on the assumption that they will meet 

 is widely heralded. 



The general principle of natural selection has been accepted 

 as an established fact for the past fifty years, and for twenty or 



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