" VARIETY " IN SYSTEMATICS. 121 



evolution, if the State cared to engage 100 trained observers 

 to collect, observe and measure, and 10 trained systematists 

 to examine and collate results for five years, facts would emerge 

 at the end which would establish, at any rate for the time being, 

 the limits of species and lower units and their developmental 

 tendencies. The writer is not for a moment advocating such 

 a course of action as a practical way of spending the State finances ! 

 The illustration is merely given by way of showing that so long as the 

 evidence is completely available no problem is absolutely beyond 

 solution. In short, where we find in the floras so-called " critical 

 species " their critical character is duo to human infirmity, and is not 

 absolute. 



Generally speaking all Indian workers seem to find that where the 

 Flora of British India gives many varieties a mixture of species may 

 be suspected, which patient collecting and collection of material will 

 (and as a fact often does) clear up. Conversely it must be admitted 

 that some species in the Floras can be broken down by patient collec- 

 tion of transitional series. Those two facts would go a long way 

 towards establishing the truth of the proposition enunciated in the 

 preceding paragraph. But unfortunately, partly owing to post- 

 Linnasan and especially modern Mendelian researches into the origin 

 of species, and partly owing to the extremely minute examination to 

 which certain particular genera have been subjected in the West, and 

 the recognition thereby of numerous intra-specific forms, there has 

 been of late years a strong tendency to cast scorn upon Systematics, 

 and even to take the final step of asserting that the individual is the 

 only ultimate unit. Fortunately, however, both the economist who 

 obtains products from plants and the field-worker who observes and 

 collects them, know that the individual is only the unit in the same 

 sense that no two members of one nation or even of one household 

 are exactly alike, and that just as human beings can be and must be 

 grouped into larger units on various scientific and social basses, so 

 among plants there are units containing millions — often countless 

 millions — of individuals, whose common characters can and must be 

 described, and to which the application of a " barbarous binomial " is 

 both convenient and necessary. 



The unit commonly accepted and used for more that a century 

 and a half is the Linnaean species. And it is this particular unit 

 upon which soma students of genetics to-day seem to cast such 

 scorn, regarding it as an erroneous conception and no true pheno- 

 menon. Now this view is one which the writer believes to be wrong. 

 Thejpractical field- worker knows that in a region with which he is 

 familiar he can at once assign to their Linnaean species all but au 



H80— ;g 



