110 THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNLIKE. [iV. 



have occurred a thousand times in the garden ; and his 

 scheme — so far as it applies to plants — is essentially that 

 followed by all good gardeners. Or, if the prejudices 

 of scientists respecting the so-called artificial production 

 of species could be overcome, he could just as well draw 

 his proofs of evolution from what has already been done 

 with cultivated plants and domesticated animals as from 

 similar results which might arise in the future from his 

 independent efforts. I am not arguing against the 

 scheme to create a species before our eyes, but I am sim- 

 ply stating what has been and is the insurmountable 

 difficulty in just this line of endeavor, — the inability of 

 the experimenter to satisfy the scientific world that he 

 has really produced a species; for it is a singular thing 

 that whilst all biologists now agree in defining a species 

 upon its tangible and present characters, they neverthe- 

 less act, for the most part, upon the old notion that a 

 species must have its origin somewhere beyond the 

 domain of exact history. 



This notion that a species, to be a species, must have 

 originated in nature's garden and not in man's, has been 

 left over to us from the last generation — it is the in- 

 heritance of an acquired character. John Ray, towards 

 the close of the seventeenth century, appears to have 

 been the first to use the word species in its technical, 

 natural -history sense, and the matter of origin was an 

 important factor in his conception of what a species is. 

 Linnaeus' s phrase is familiar: "We reckon as many 

 species as there were forms created in the beginning." 

 Darwin elaborated the new conception — that a species is 

 simply a congregation of individuals which are more like 

 each other than they are like any other ('ongregation, 

 and with a freedom from prejudice which is rarely at- 



