NEW SPECIES OF CARNATIONS. 139 



By way of resume I present a more condensed argument 

 favoring the assumption that a new species of carnation has 

 originated from the Alegatiere type. Darwin, Huxley, and all 

 authorities worth considering, admit that varieties are the parents 

 of species; that species are the offspring of a single primitive 

 stock, and each is a natural or cultivated variety and may be arti- 

 ficially originated, conformed and established by selection and 

 environments. 



"Special Creation" and "Transmutation" are the only two 

 hypotheses respecting the origin of species. One views their 

 origin as arising by a supernatural creative act. The other holds 

 that species are modifications of pre-existing species through 

 purely natural causes. 



One of these theories assumes that a species is formed at once 

 and at the moment the male and female elements meet in the ovary. 

 The other, that species are initiated by varieties, and by natural 

 or artificial selection and by physical environments gradually 

 moulded into a separate class. And that classes or species are 

 known as being separate by morphology (structures), or physiology 

 (vitalities), or by both structure and vitality, and that these 

 constitute the boundary line between species. 



For forty years, selection has been practiced with the species 

 of carnations of the La Puritie type, originated with Alegatiere 

 and conditioned with new environment, and a new species of car- 

 nation is the resultant. 



Its morphological boundary lies between a procumbent plant 

 with a two-inch stemless pendent flower and an erect plant with 

 a four-inch flower on a three-foot stem. Its physiological bound- 

 ary lies between a plant whose nature is on the arid side of 

 culture, requiring little manurial nutriments and yielding its 

 florescence in a 45 degrees temperature; and a plant requiring 55 

 degrees of heat to afford its bloom, requiring much moisture and 

 manurial foods, impatient of all aridness, and circulating a great 

 volume of vegetable blood. Either the morphological or phys- 

 iological difference constitutes, according to authority, enough of 

 a divergence to install a new species. 



