Characters as Adaptive and Specific. 205 



young man's troubles, Kerner fills five or six pages 

 with little else than rows of specific names. 



Upon the whole, Kerner concludes that the more 

 the subject is studied, the more convinced must the 

 student become that all distinction between species as 

 " good " and ' bad " vanishes. In other words, the more 

 that our knowledge of species and of their diagnostic 

 characters increases, the more do we find that " bad 

 species" multiply at the expense of " good species" ; so 

 that eventually we must relinquish the idea of " good 

 species " altogether. Or, conversely stated, we must 

 agree to regard as equally " good species " any and 

 every assemblage of individuals which present the 

 same peculiarities : provided that these peculiarities 

 do not rise to a generic value, they equally deserve 

 to be regarded as "specific characters," no matter 

 how trivial, or how local, they may be. In fact, he 

 goes so far as to say that when, as a result of 

 experiments in transplantation from one set of 

 physical conditions to another, seedlings are found 

 to present any considerable and constant change in 

 their specific characters, these seedlings are no less 

 entitled to be regarded as a ' good species " than 

 are the plants from which they have been derived. 

 Probably few systematists will consent to go quite 

 so far as this ; but the fact that Kerner has been 

 led deliberately to propound such a statement as 

 a result of his wide observations and experiments 

 is about as good evidence as possible on the 

 points with which we are here, concerned. For even 

 Simplicius would hardly be quite so simple as to 

 suppose that each one of all the characters which 

 he observes in his " remarkable flora," so largely 



