128 VARIATION 



of a new species necessarily seemed to involve the death of the 

 old one," at least the old merged into the new. 



The experimenter points out, however, that through all the 

 process of originating a dozen or more distinct forms, the parent 

 stock continued unchanged, and still constituted the principal 

 strain of all the primroses, 1 and from this he deduces the law 

 that mutants are laterals. 



3. " New elementary species attain their full constancy at 

 once." " Constancy is not the result of selection or of improve- 

 ment. It is a quality of its own. It can neither be constrained 

 by selection if it is absent from the beginning, nor does it need 

 any natural or artificial aid if it is present.". 



De Vries remarks that scintillans repeats its characters in 

 but part of its offspring, and that he has " tried to deliver it 

 from this incompleteness of heredity but in vain. . . . The insta- 

 bility seems to be here as permanent a quality as the stability 

 in other instances. Even here no selection has been adequate 

 to change the original form." He regards it as itself in a state 

 of instability. 



4. " Some of the new strains are evidently elementary species, 

 while others are to be considered as varieties." 



Elementary species are regarded as possessed of progressive 

 characters, but varieties as differing from their parent stock in 

 but a single character, and that in the way either of an assump- 

 tion or of a loss. The elementary species is, therefore, a new 

 aggregation of characters, while the variety is simply the old 

 form minus a single character. Whether this distinction holds, 

 remains to be determined. Much of the argument turns upon 

 what is to be considered as a character and when it is lost. For 



1 A natural corollary to this observation is to remark upon the erroneous popu- 

 lar assumption that of similar and contemporaneous forms the more primitive are 

 necessarily the progenitors of the more nearly perfect. For example, it is hastily 

 assumed that if evolution is true then man must be the direct descendant of the 

 ape. But the ape, though very old, is still an ape, and he is not descending into 

 anything but apes. Though evidently developed from the same original stock at 

 some time and in some way, whether by one or by many mutations nobody knows, 

 yet the gap between us is evidently fixed and not growing less or being bridged 

 at any point. Good evolution regards related forms as connected by ties of con- 

 sanguinity, but whether direct, or, what is more likely, indirect, running to some 

 extinct common ancestor, only a novice will attempt to say. 



