AMONGST PLANTS. 13 



in the Upright tomato. Even the sudden appearance of these 

 strange forms is proof that species may originate at any time, and 

 that it can be no part of our fundamental conception of a species 

 that it shall have originated in some remote epoch. Species- 

 niaking forever enforces the idea of the distinctness and immuta- 

 bility of organic forms, but study of organisms themselves forever 

 enforces an opposite conception. The intermediate and variable 

 forms are perplexities to one who attempts to describe species as 

 so many entities which have distinct and personal attributes. So 

 the garden has always been the bugbear of the botanist. Even 

 our lamented Asa Gray declared that the modern garden roses are 

 '• too much mixed by crossing and changed by variation to be 

 subjects of botanical study." He meant to say that the roses are 

 too much modified to allow of species-making. The despair of 

 systematic botanists is the proof of evolution ! 



I repeat that mere species-making, in the old or conventional 

 sense, is an incubus to the study of nature. One who now de- 

 scribes a species should feel that he is simply describing a variable 

 .and plastic group of individuals for mere convenience' sake. He 

 should not attempt to draw the boundary lines hard and fast, nor 

 should he be annoyed if he is obliged to modify his description 

 every year. This loose group may contain some forms which 

 seem to be aberrant to the idea which he has in mind ; and il 

 would seem as if he should be ready to call them new or distinct 

 species whenever, from whatever cause, they become so much 

 modified that it is convenient, for purposes of identification and 

 description, to separate them from the general type. Just as soon 

 as botanists come to feel that all so-called species of plants are 

 transitory and artificial groups maintained for convenience in the 

 study of nature, they will not ask whether they are modified out- 

 side the garden or inside it, but will consider groups of equal 

 distinctness and permanence to be of equal value in the classifi- 

 cation of knowledge, wholly aside from the mere place of their 

 origin. At the present time, the garden fence is the only distinc- 

 tion between many accepted species and many discarded ones. 

 The cultivation of man differs from the methods of nature only in 

 degree, not in kind; and if man secures results sooner than nature 

 does, it is only another and indubitable proof of the evolution of 



