HEREDITY AND EVOLUTION. 525 



From this, at least, the earlier experimenters were free ; and the under- 

 takings of Gartner and his contemporaries were informed by the true 

 conception that the properties and behavior of species were themselves 

 specific. Free from the later fancy that but for selection the forms 

 of animals and plants would be continuous and indeterminate, they 

 recognized the definiteness of species and variety, and boldly set them- 

 selves to work out case by case the manifestations and consequences 

 of that definiteness. 



Over this work of minute and largely experimental analysis, rap- 

 idly growing, the new doctrine that organisms are mere conglomerates 

 of adaptative devices descended like a numbing spell. By an easy con- 

 fusion of thought, faith in the physiological definiteness of species and 

 variety passed under the common ban which had at last exorcised the 

 demon immutability. Henceforth no naturalist must hold commun- 

 ion with either, on pain of condemnation as an apostate, a danger to 

 the dynasty of selection. From this oppression we in England, at 

 least, are scarcely beginning to emerge. Bentham's ' Flora/ teaching 

 very positively that the primrose, the cowslip, and the oxlip are imper- 

 manent varieties of one species, is in the hand of every beginner, while 

 the British Museum reading-room finds it unnecessary to procure Gart- 

 ner's ' Bastarderzeugung .' 



And so this mass of specific learning has passed out of account. 

 The evidence of the collector, the horticulturist, the breeder, the fan- 

 cier, has been treated with neglect, and sometimes, I fear, with con- 

 tempt. That' wide field whence Darwin drew his wonderful store of 

 facts has been some forty years untouched. Speak to professional 

 zoologists of any breeder's matter, and how many will not intimate to 

 you politely that fanciers are unscientific persons, and their concerns 

 beneath notice? For the concrete in evolution we are offered the ab- 

 stract. Our philosophers debate with great fluency whether between 

 imaginary races sterility could grow up by an imaginary selection; 

 whether selection working upon hypothetical materials could produce 

 sexual differentiation; how under a system of natural selection bodily 

 symmetry may have been impressed on formless protoplasm — that mon- 

 strous figment of the mind, fit starting-point for such discussions. 

 But by a physiological irony enthusiasm for these topics is sometimes 

 fully correlated with indifference even to the classical illustrations; 

 and for many whose minds are attracted by the abstract problem of 

 interracial sterility there are few who can name for certain ten cases 

 in which it has been already observed. 



And yet in the natural world, in the collecting-box, the seed-bed, 

 the poultry-yard, the places where variation, heredity, selection, may 

 be seen in operation and their properties tested, answers to these ques- 

 tions meet us at every turn — fragmentary answers, it is true, but each 

 direct to the point. For if any one will stoop to examine nature in 



