THE SHASTA DAISY 321 



We shall have occasion to discuss this phase 

 of heredity more fully in another connection. In 

 the meantime, for our present purpose, it suffices 

 to recall that biologists of every school will ad- 

 mit the force of the general statement that 

 heredity is the sum of past environments, and 

 to make the specific application that our Jap- 

 anese and our English and American daisies are 

 different because long generations of their an- 

 cestors have lived in different geographical ter- 

 ritories and therefore have been subject to diverse 

 environing conditions. 



In a word, then, the Shasta Daisy which 

 stands to-day as virtually a new creation, so 

 widely different from any other plant that no 

 botanist would hesitate to describe it as a new 

 species, owes its existence to the bringing to- 

 gether of conflicting hereditary tendencies that 

 epitomize the ancestral experiences gained in 

 widely separated geographical territories. 



Without the aid of man, the plants that had 

 found final refuge in Europe and America and 

 Japan, respectively, would never have been 

 brought in contact, and so the combination of 

 traits that built up the Shasta Daisy would never 

 have been produced. 



In that sense, then, artificial selection created 

 the Shasta Daisy, but the forces evoked were 



Vol. 1 Bur. K 



