SPECIES-MONGERING 367 



had given different names to the same plant in different regions ; 

 their unco-ordinated observations tended to obscurity rather 

 than light. 



What is to become of specific Botany I cannot think. I 

 have only last week found out that the little Rhododendron 

 anthopogon described by Don, WalHch, Eoyle, Lindley, 

 Hooker and three times by Hooker-fil. is the very old 

 Osmanthus pallidus — absolutely identical — not a variety 

 even ! I also took up the Indian Vaccinia and found that 

 out of 16 species figured in Wight's ^ Icones no less than 9 

 were bad and old ! 



Man .had not found what nature indeed had denied, a 

 common standard for differentiation between species, varieties, 

 transitional forms ; nor an independent basis for that ab- 

 straction, the specific type, so useful as a label, so dangerous 

 as a determinant. The very name conjures up the ancient 

 logical battle between NominaHsts and ReaHsts ; and the 

 latter day Realists, perhaps unconscious of their intellectual 

 affinities, were in the ascendant, upholding the existence of 

 such types, the living approximations to which constituted 

 species. 



Full reahsation of this state of things could only come 

 through knowledge at once profound and far reaching such 

 as Hooker's, uniting as it did the close personal study of 

 entire floras and of the literature that dealt with them, repre- 

 senting every kind of region from the Poles to the tropics — 

 the Antarctic, New Zealand, Australia, India, the Galapagos 

 Islands, Aden, and the Niger, besides the botany of certain 

 Arctic voyages, and much of Ceylon and the Cape. Only 

 such intimate knowledge, ranging over the widest areas, could 



1 Robert Wight (1796-1872), M.D., of Edinburgh, entered the E.I.C. 

 service and became a leading Indian botanist. He was early in touch with 

 Sir W. Hooker, in whose botanical periodicals he began to publish his material 

 when on furlough after 1831. At the same time he published with Arnott one 

 vol. of his Prodromus Florae Peninsulae Indiae Orientalis. His later work in 

 India included inquiry into the cultivation of useful plants and the charge of 

 an experimental cotton farm, while at considerable loss to himself he published 

 his Illustrations of Indian Botany with coloured, and Icones Plantarum Indiae 

 Orientalis with uncoloured plates, numbering over 2000. 



