80 LINN&US AS AN EVOLUTIONIST 



species in the beginning, the other was prob- 

 ably not so old; more likely to have come into 

 existence away down among the more arid 

 hills of Spain ; but it had come to stay. Rather 

 many plant forms that had been reckoned good 

 species before Linnaeus and that are now again 

 so considered everywhere today, were with 

 Linnaeus mere varieties of other species. But 

 he declined so to treat Thalictrum lucidum. 

 If the relation between this denizen of the 

 fervid South and his plant of the frigid Scan- 

 dinavian peninsula should be declared nothing 

 more than the relation between a specific 

 type and its variation, botanists would be 

 asking how long before he would make an 

 end of species altogether. He was not him- 

 self convinced that it was a mere variety, 

 and so he retains it as a probable species, 

 yet to his half secret thinking not as first 

 created such, but the descendant of another 

 species. 



Familiar as I had been for many years with 

 the Species Plantarum as a book of reference, 

 this one discovery upon which I had now 

 stumbled, seemed so much like a new revela- 

 tion of the mind of Linnaeus that within a very 

 few days I had read every one of the 1682 

 pages of the edition of the year 1764 in search 



