88 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



consider that botanists and philosophers persist in refusing to see 

 it, I am constrained to offer some suggestions upon De Varigny's 

 excellent ambition. If I show a botanist a horticultural type of 

 recent or even contemporaneous origin which I consider to be 

 specifically distinct from its ancestors, he at once exclaims that it 

 is not a species but a horticultural variety. If I ask him why, he 

 replies, "Because it is an artificial production!" If I show him 

 that the type is just as distinct from the species from which it 

 sprung as that species is from its related species and that it 

 reproduces its kind with just as much certaiuity, he still replies 

 that, because it is a horticultural production, it cannot be a 

 species. In what, then, does an accidental horticultural origin 

 differ from any other origin? Simply in the fact that one takes 

 place under the eye of man and the other occurs somewhere else ! 

 It is impossible at the present day to make a definition of a 

 species which shall exclude many horticultural types, unless an 

 arbitrary exception is made of them. The old definitions assumed 

 that species are special creative acts, and the method of origin is 

 therefore stated or implied in all of them. The definition itself, 

 therefore, was essentially a statement of the impossibility of 

 evolution. We have now revised our definitions so as to exclude 

 the matter of origin, and thereby to allow free course to evolution 

 studies ; and yet here is a great class of natural objects which are 

 practically eliminated from our consideration because, unhappily, 

 we know whence they came ! Or, to state the case differently, 

 these types cannot be accepted as proofs of the transformation of 

 species because we know certainly that they are the result of 

 transformation ! 



Now, just this state of things would be sure to occur if De 

 Varigny were to transform one species into another. People 

 would say that the new form is not really a species, because it is 

 the result of cultivation, domestication, and definite breeding by 

 man. He could never hope to secure more remarkable trans- 

 formations than 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 



