424 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. VIII. No. 196, 



venience? As I do not pretend to be in the 

 position of a philosopher, but approach the 

 subject as a very commonplace sort of a bot- 

 antist, the word species as used by me means 

 simply species as understood by the system- 

 atic botanist and indirectly by those work- 

 ing in other departments of botany who are 

 obliged to depend to a considerable extent 

 upon the limitations of species as defined 

 by systematists. 



The publication of the Origin of Species 

 in 1859, a date which marks the fall of the 

 old school and the rise of the new, is suffi- 

 cient to show that it is not probable that 

 any other period of fifty years in the future 

 will have the same comparative historical 

 importance, as far as the question of the 

 conception of species is concerned, as the 

 fifty years we are now commemorating. 

 Had we asked any of the botanical mem- 

 bers of the Association in 1848 what they 

 meant by species they would have replied, 

 most of them without reserve, a few with 

 some hesitation, that in the beginning God 

 created all species as he intended them to 

 be and that by searching the naturalist 

 could find them out. Just how they recog- 

 nized species when they saw them would 

 have been very hard for them to say, as 

 they did not agree in their standards, but 

 they would probably all have agreed in say- 

 ing that the recognition of species was a 

 matter of individual judgment, one's own 

 judgment, of course, being better than that 

 of any one else. The skeptic at that time 

 could not have failed to notice the frequency 

 with which what was home-made was con- 

 fused with what was God-given. Before 

 1859 creation was one vast pudding in 

 which the species had been placed like 

 plums by an Almighty hand, and the natu- 

 ralists, sitting in a corner like greedy little 

 Jack Horners, put in their thumbs, and 

 pulled out the plums and cried : " See what 

 a great naturalist am I — I have found a 

 new species ! " 



Probably very few of my hearers have 

 any personal recollection of the time when 

 not to believe that species were fixed and 

 immutable creations was enough to make 

 one a scientific and almost a social outcast. 

 I recall but a few people whom I knew who 

 held these orthodox views, for it was my 

 good fortune to be a student in college at the 

 time of the appearance of what was called 

 ' a new edition of the Origin of Species 

 revised and augmented by the author,' pub- 

 lished by D. Appleton & Co. in 1864. By 

 that time the novelty and audacity of Dar- 

 win's views had ceased to cause a cold 

 shudder, and certainly the students of my 

 time were ready to swallow not only what 

 Darwin had written, but to add a few little 

 theories of their own. 



The young botanist of to-day will, I 

 think, pardon me, although my contempo- 

 raries may not, if I give a short sketch of 

 the Harvard Natural History Society in the 

 sixties, as showing not only how changed 

 is the position of natural history in Amer- 

 ican colleges, but also the attitude of col- 

 lege students at that day toward the then 

 new doctrine of evolution. If the Society 

 soon after my college days passed out of 

 existence, its end could not be said to be 

 untimely, for the attitude not only of the 

 university, but of the scientific public, to- 

 wards the study of natural history had so 

 changed that the old-fashioned society had 

 no place. Those of you who go to Cam- 

 bridge next Friday may perhaps see a 

 dreary barn-like sort of a lecture room 

 which now occupies the greater part of old 

 Massachusetts Hall. In days gone by, the 

 three upper stories of the hall served as 

 dormitories, and the lower story was occu- 

 pied by the rooms of the Natural History 

 Society sandwiched in between those of the 

 institute of 1770, which then was pleased to 

 consider itself to be a literary society, and 

 the laboratory of the Eumford Chemical 

 Society, which, as it emitted none of the 



