320 TAXONOMY. 



indeed of nearly all our varieties of cultivated annual and biennial 

 esculent plants, as well as of several perennials, many of which 

 have been fixed through centuries of domestication, while others 

 are of recent establishment. What is now taking place with 

 the Peach in this country may convince us that heritable varieties 

 may be developed in trees as well as in herbs, and in the same 

 manner ; and that the reason why most races are annuals or 

 biennials is because these can be perpetuated in no other way, 

 and because the desired result is obtainable in fewer years than 

 in shrubs or trees. Varieties of this fixity of character are called 



633. Races (Lat. Proles). A race, in this technical sense of 

 the term, is a variety which is perpetuated with considerable 

 certainty by sexual propagation. This distinction of varieties 

 pertains chiefly to botany. In the animal kingdom all permanent 

 varieties must be races. So are all indigenous varieties of 

 plants. 1 In most of these, the position of species and variety is 

 more or less arbitrary or accidental, and capable of interchange. 

 What is called the species may be only a commoner or better- 

 known form, or the one first recognized and named by botanists ; 

 whence the other forms as they come to be recognized are made 

 to rank in the books as varieties. Instead of one varying from 

 the other, all the forms have probably varied ages ago from a 

 common type. 



634. These varieties of the highest order and most marked 

 characteristics, being perpetuable by seed, have the principal 

 attributes of species. They are a kind of subordinate derivative 

 species. Hence they are sometimes called Subspecies. We 

 judge them not to be so many species, either because in the case 

 of cultivated races we know something of their origin or history, 

 and more of the grave changes which long domestication may 

 bring to pass; or because the forms, however stable, differ 

 among themselves less than recognized species generally do ; or 

 because very striking differences in the extremes are connected 

 by intermediate forms. And our conclusions, it must be under- 

 'stood, "are not facts, but judgments, and largely fallible judg- 

 ments." 2 For while some varieties appear strikingly different, 

 some species are very much alike. 8 



1 The Horseradish and a few other plants of spontaneous growth, which 

 through long dependence on bud-propagation seem to have lost the power 

 of setting seed, can hardly be called varieties. 



2 Darwiniana, 35. 



8 Wherefore, since we hardly need the term race in the restricted sense 

 of seed-propagated variety, it is sometimes convenient to use it in the man- 

 ner proposed by Bentham (Anniversary Address to the Linnean Society, 



