144 ORIGINAL AETICLES. 



But the results thus obtained are liable to very great fallacies, unless the 

 experiment is followed out in all its bearings, with many precautions 

 rarely attended to ; and what is supposed to furnish irresistible proofs 

 of permanency of character, when inquired into, will often be found to 

 add nothing at all to the arguments derived from observation. 



In the first place, it is a very common practice, in thus testing by 

 cultivation the permanency of character in a plant, to remove it bodily 

 to a garden, and there to propagate it by suckers, cuttings, or other 

 modes of division — an experiment which may, indeed, show the imme- 

 diate effects of soil, climate, or other extraneous influences on the indi- 

 vidual — but, as a test of value between species and variety, it can be of 

 no avail. It is the very method adopted by gardeners for perpetuating 

 individual variations. The only mode in which the test can really bear 

 upon the question, is by sowing the seed, and observing the results in 

 future generations. And in this proceeding it is not enough to raise a 

 few plants in one spot, for two or three generations ; for such a course 

 would prove our varieties of kitchen-garden annuals to be all distinct 

 species, which we all know is not the fact ; the cultivation must be on a 

 large scale, under circumstances of soil, climate, &c, as varied as the 

 plant will bear, and for many generations ; and, after all, the proofs of 

 distinctness can scarcely be absolute, for they consist, as it were, in 

 proving a negative. The object is not to show how long a particular 

 form can be made to endure, but that it will always endure, in spite of 

 external influences or other accidents — that it will not vary under any 

 circumstances, or at any time. The cultivation must be that of the gar- 

 dener, whose object is to raise new varieties — not of the curator, desirous 

 of keeping his botanic garden usefully cropped, and correctly named — still 

 less of the botanist, who seeks to uphold a species he has set up. The 

 former sows extensively in different localities, in order to have the 

 greater chance of accidental aberration ; he carefully watches his seed- 

 lings as they grow up, and selects his seeds for the next generation from 

 such plants as show the slightest tendency to vary in the wished-for 

 direction. The curator, on the contrary, anxious to keep his types true, 

 if he selects the seed at all, takes it from the most healthy, normal, and 

 characteristic individuals. 



To illustrate the very slender grounds upon which botanists of con- 

 siderable and well-deserved reputation will occasionally adduce the re- 

 sults of cultivation as convincing proofs of specific distinctness, let us 

 select from Grenier and Godron's Mora an instance taken from a genus 

 worked up with great care, by one of the most accurate observers of in- 

 dividual varieties and local races, and whose views as to their reception 

 as a species M. Grenier entirely adopts. Under Galium spurhwi, he 

 says, " Cette espece se produisant invariablement de graines sansperdre 

 aucun de ses caracteres, ne saurait etre confondue avec le G. Aparine." To 

 justify so sweeping and positive an assertion, we must suppose that he, 

 or some one on whose exactness he has implicit reliance, has sown in 

 several successive years each of the three varieties he mentions of G. 

 spiirium, besides the smaller forms of what he considers the true G. 



