^6 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



as distiuct from the others and from its ancestors as accepted 

 species of Phaseolus are from each other, yet, because of their 

 origin under domestication, they are debarred specific distinction. 

 Now, a most curious thing about these dwarf Lima beans, which 

 Jiav-e appeared so suddenly in the past few years, is that they 

 have come from each of these three types, — Henderson's from the 

 Sieva type, Thorburn's or Dreer's from the Potato Lima type, 

 and Burpee's from the Large Lima type, — thus showing that each 

 of these types or races is developing along independent but 

 parallel lines ; and these lines are also identical with the method 

 of evolution which was early assumed by the common garden bean 

 and with the departure which has just now appeared in the old 

 White Dutch Runner. 



The Soy bean, now coming into popular cultivation in the 

 South, affords a most striking example of the evolution of a new 

 species, and one, moreover, which is accepted by careful botan- 

 ists. This plant is unknown wild, and there is every reason to 

 consider it to be a modified form of the wild Glycine Soja of 

 China and Japan ; but its botanical characters are so unlike those 

 of its ancestral household that Maximowicz — a most conservative 

 botanist — describes it outright as a new species. Glycine hispida. 

 I have now brought to your attention a few familiar plants for 

 the purpose of showing that what are, to all intents and purposes, 

 good species have originated in recent years ; and that, whilst 

 botanists demand that the origination of species within historic 

 times shall constitute the only indisputable proof of organic evo- 

 lution, they nevertheless refuse to accept as species those forms 

 which have thus origiuated and which answer every demand of 

 their definitions and practice. The proofs of the evolution of 

 species, drawn from the accepted practice of the best botanists 

 themselves, could be indefinitely extended. We need only recall 

 the botanical confusion in which most cultivated plants now lie, to 

 find abundant proof of the evolution of hundreds of types, so dis- 

 tinct that the best botanists have considered them to be species ; 

 but other botanists, basing their estimate of species upon 

 origins, have rechiced them or reincluded them into the form or 

 type first described. Consider the number of species which have 

 been made in the genus Citrus, comprising the various oranges, 

 lemons, limes, and the like. Recall the roses. The Moss rose 

 and others would be regarded as distinct species by any botanist 



