THE SHASTA DAISY 311 



of past environments. The traits and tendencies 

 that we transmit to our children are traits and 

 tendencies that have been built into the organ- 

 isms of our ancestors through their age-long 

 contact with varying environmental conditions. 



The American oxeye daisy, through long gen- 

 erations of growth under the specific climatic 

 conditions of New England, had developed 

 certain traits that peculiarly adapted it to life 

 in that region. 



Similarly the European daisy had developed 

 a different set of traits under the diverse condi- 

 tions of soil and climate of Europe. 



And in the third place, the Japanese daisy had 

 developed yet more divergent traits under the 

 conditions of life in far away Japan, because 

 these conditions were not only more widely dif- 

 ferent from the conditions of Europe and 

 America than these are from each other, but 

 also because the Japanese plant came of a race 

 that had in all probability separated from the 

 original parent stock of all the daisies at a time 

 much more remote than the time at which the 

 European and American daisies were separated. 



The Plant as a Cameka 



To make the meaning of this quite clear, we 

 must recall that a given organism — say in this 



