Jan. 3, 1884J 



NA TURE 



215 



coral limesioiic, ^Yhich forms but a comparatively tbin 

 cru5t, and has been altogether removed from most of the 

 higher regions by sub-aerial agencies. However, I have 

 observed the raised coral rock still preserved at consider- 

 able heights above the sea, and in two localities at eleva- 

 tions of 900 feet. 



" Amongst the sub-group known as the Shortland 

 Islands, 1 came upon beds of this itnpurc calcareous rock 

 (beneath the raised coral rock) abounding in Ptcropods, 

 mostly Hyalaa, and large foraminiferous tests, mingled 

 with shells, some of them of shallow water habit. 



" I am, &c., " H. B. Guppy" 



A FORGOTTEN EVOLUTIONIST 



A BOOK has lately come into my hands a ^t.\\ words 

 about which may possibly interest some of the 

 readers of Nature. Its title is " Histoire Naturelle des 

 Fraisier>" ; the author was A. N. Duchesne, and it was 

 published at Paris in 1766. It must be, I suspect, an un- 

 common book, for there is no copy in the litirary of the 

 Royal Gardens at Kew. And this library, comprising as 

 it does the contributions of many collectors who allowed 

 little to escape them, is remarkably complete; Mr. 

 Daydon Jackson has in fact found in it more than a 

 thousand publications the titles of which are not to be 

 met with in the last edition of Pritzel's well-known 

 " Thesaurus." 



The scarceness of a botanical book is not perhaps in 

 itself a matter of any great moment, and i bought the 

 book out of a provincial sale catalogue without expecting 

 it to be particularly interesting, though I knew Du- 

 chesne's name as an authority on the cultivated forms of 

 the strawberry. I very soon, however, came to the con- 

 clusion on looking over it that it was a very remarkable 

 production indeed, and in a scientific sense at least a 

 century in advance of its time. 



Duchesne's book is in fact the record of a purely bio- 

 logical study of a small group of plants. The significance 

 of work of this sort has only been thoroughly recognised 

 since the publication of the " Origin of Species." Just as 

 "ith C. K. Sprengel, whose book was also written in the 

 last century (1793), the world has had to roll on far into 

 another hundred years before it was ready to do justice 

 to this kind of research. There is a curious incongruous- 

 ness between the freshness and modernness of the ideas 

 and the faded type and musty paper in which they are 

 embalmed. 



Duchesne plunges at once into the business of his 

 book in the first line of the preface with a straight- 

 forward simplicity not unworthy of Mr. Darwin. I will 

 attempt a translation of the first paragraph : — 



"The wish to see if it were possible to raise from seed 

 a plant which scarcely ever produces any has led me by 

 a happy chance to the production of a new race, which 

 made its appearance at Versailles in 1761. This circum- 

 stance induced me to more closely devote myself to the 

 study of strawberries, and led me to another discovery. 

 I found that they are not all truly hermaphrodite ; forms 

 exist, in fact, which are sexually differentiated.' And I 

 have succeeded in the past year, 1765, in fertilising, by 

 means of one set of plants, individuals of anoiher sort, which 

 are cultivated as a matter of curiosity, and are constantly 

 sterile. ( )nc, amongst others, has produced fruits of 

 great beauty; M. le Marquis de Marigny has obiained 

 for me the honour of having this submitted to the king, 

 and it is to be raised in the Versailles Gardens by ray 

 method. This unexpected success has still more re- 

 doubled my ardour to make further observations." 



The race so produced, which Duchesne called Le 

 Fraisier dc Versailles, or Fragaria monophylla, is un- 



■ 'Ihis must be one of the first observations of the tendency tf plants 

 with hermapbrocl.te flowers to pass into the ditcnous state. The fact is now 

 well established. (See Darwin's " Forms of Flowers," pp. 278-309) 



doubted ly a very curious plant. All its leaves are per- 

 manently unifoliate ; i.e. instead of bearing three leaflets. 

 as is ordinarily the case with strawberries, the petioles 

 bear but one. Duchesne observes that this is also the 

 case with the first leaves of all seedling strawberries. 

 Fragaria monophylla may be therefore regarded as a 

 form which always retains the juvenile, and never arrives 

 at the adult, foliage, and this peculiarity remains constant 

 in subsequent generations. The effect of crossing, as a 

 potent stimulus to variation, could not but have power- 

 fully impressed Duchesne in so striking a case as this, 

 and further observations seemed to have led him to 

 account for the common characters which otherwise 

 diverging forms exhibited as best accounted for by a 

 common ancestral origin. The study of geographically 

 separated species, however, necessarily led him to see 

 that something more than crossing was needed to account 

 for variation m every case. In discussing Fragaria 

 virginiana, a nati\'e of North America, which is the 

 origin of the race of Scarlets, Duchesne speculates as to 

 its derivation from the wild F. vesca of Europe, and 

 attributes the divergences from this type to t le eflect of 

 North American soil and climate. 



His work on Strawberries, where he was dealing 

 mainly with races, led him to speculate with regard to the 

 higher groups of species, genera, and orders. His results 

 seem to me, for the time, so extraordinarily bold, and 

 therefore historically so interesting, that I quote the first 

 portion of the Recapitulation, pp. 219-221, entire, in the 

 original French : — 



"J'ai d^ja dit, a I'occasion du Fraisier-ananas, qu'il 

 etoit tr^s-diffic'le de ranger en ligne droite les diverses 

 Races d'une meme Espfece, de mani^re qu'on put passer 

 de I'une a I'autre par gradations de nuance. Cela est 

 peut-etre aussi impossible, que de ranger en ligne droite 

 les Especes, les Genres, et les Families ; par la raison 

 que chaque Race, comme chaque Espece, chaque Genre, 

 ou chaque Famille, a des rapports de ressemblance avec 

 plusieurs autres. 



" L'ordre Genealogique est done le seul cjue la nature 

 indique, le seul qui satisfasse pleinement I'esprit ; tout 

 autre est arbitraire et vide d'iddes. J'ai eu soin, a 

 chacune des Races de Fraisiers, d'indiquer ce qui m'a 

 paru vraisemblable a cet ^gard; mais je n'ose me flatter 

 d'avoir toujours rencontri^ juste. II faudroit, pour le bien 

 faire, avoir des connaissances certaines et precises du 

 pays natal de chaque Fraisier, ou bien, du tems 011 il a 

 ete dlevd de graine, et de quel autre Fraisier provenoit 

 cette graine ; j'ai fait voir combien on manquoit encore 

 de lumieres sur tout cela. 



" C'est par cette raison que je me suis permis de donner 

 mes conjectures ; en voici les r^sultats ; la forme d'.^rbre 

 genealogique les rendra encore plus sensibles, et en fera. 

 mieux saisir I'ensemble." 



It is certainly startling to come upon a phylogeny of 

 the most modern type in a book more than a century old. 

 It was not till after I had gratified myself with a study 

 of Duchesne's remarkable speculations that it flashed 

 across my mind that attention had already recently been 

 called to them ; and I found, in fact, that Prof. Alphonse-. 

 de CandoUe, in a short paper put together with the feli- 

 citous erudition of whicli he seems to possess so inex- 

 haustible a store, had already, in May of last year,' stated 

 most of the points on which I have dwelt above. And he 

 mentions that, on the occasion of a visit to Mr. Darwin 

 in 1 8S0 he told him of the existence of the book, which. 

 he describes, justly enough, as "a very curious work, 

 older than that of Lamarck, but to which no one had 

 ever referred except fur points of secondary interest." 



I know little about Duchesne himself De Candolle 

 says that he was a horticulturist and Professor of Natural 

 History, and that his knowledge was as varied as it was 



" '■ Darwin cor.side'id au point ce vne des causes de son succes," &c., 

 Arc/ikiS ,ics .'.tAuu-s, Ma;-, !i32. 



