170 Heredity and Eugenics 



many instances in which there is good reason for believing 

 that domesticated varieties of pigeons, birds, and cattle, 

 and many plants, have arisen by the sporting process. 



Most biologists have 'insisted upon retaining that 

 cherished dogmatism of the seventeenth and eighteenth 

 centuries that there must be discontinuity between species, 

 and the idea seemed plausible that if discontinuity existed 

 between species when they were finished, there was no 

 a-priori reason why it could not have arisen at the start. 

 Therefore, Bateson, in the latter part of the nineteenth 

 century, gathered what data existed in the literature on 

 sports and discontinuous variations, in the effort to find an 

 outlet from the cul-de-sac into which neo-Darwinianism 

 had led English biologists. 



At about the same time DeVries in Holland became 

 convinced from a somewhat different point of view that a 

 similar process must be operative in the production of 

 species in nature. DeVries sought, therefore, to find in 

 nature plants which exhibited the kind of variation that 

 he conceived of as being the basis of transmutation, and 

 finally discovered that Oenothera Lamarckiana seemed to 

 be undergoing exactly the sort of process which he hoped 

 to find. 



Others became convinced that there were possibilities 

 in this direction, and as a result there is at present a well- 

 developed school of saltationists whose central idea is 

 that progressive and efficient steps in transmutation take 

 place through sudden, steplike variations, producing, as 

 DeVries asserts, something quite new each time. 



Directly associated with the development of this idea, 

 and contributing much to its development, was the redis- 

 covery of Mendel's paper on the "Behavior of Hybrid 



