REV. JOHN GERARD, F.L.S., ON SPECIES AND THEIR ORIGIN. 155 
as unstable and even as non-existent. The question—or rather the 
different questions—was as old as the controversy between the 
nominalists and the realists ; but there was a real practical value in 
this question of species. If there was an answer to be found they 
would at the same time have found a conclusive answer to the query 
whether there was anything but mere accident in it all. 
It was generally agreed that the species had a real existence 
apart from the individual, but much confusion was introduced by 
the existence of the protean genera. 
Was man more ignorant than the dog? Dogs at any rate were 
all realists. For them there was no confusion introduced by the 
extraordinary forms at which the breeder had arrived. Great Dane 
or dachshund, it made no difference. The dog was always recognis- 
able and treated as such. 
It was to the speaker one of the most remarkable things to 
consider the extraordinary results arrived at by an old gentleman 
walking in his garden. The Abbé Mendel, a gardener and a most 
patient observer of nature, had been able to demonstrate the rules 
that governed the reversion to the original type, and only now was 
the significance of Mendel’s discovery being made evident to them 
by the work of those who had rediscovered him. Reversion to type 
was for them the real test of species. Asa Gray wrote of making 
and unmaking species—but did he ever unmake any of these 
realities ? 
The speaker himself had only studied one genus—cinchonu—a 
protean genus, but giving real species, each reversionary to its type. 
He could wish to have his whole life before him to study this 
genus in the light of Mendelism. 
But without a mind behind them all the differences of which they 
spoke could have no real existence: this perpetual flux, if it were 
true, was a greater evidence of mind than anything else in Science ; 
and men, generally, were coming more and more to favour a broad 
and general evolution under and controlled by a mind. 
Professor HULL congratulated the author on the able manner in 
which he had handled an abstruse subject. There was a double 
difficulty to be met ; first, to define a “species,” and secondly, to 
account on natural grounds for its development. Through his forty 
years on the Geological Survey, the question of what was a species 
was constantly cropping up, and was especially conflicting—because 
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