276 THE HISTORY OF CREATION. 
tinguish accurately kindred forms as so many “good 
species.” However, it has been found scarcely possible, in 
any group, to make an accurate and consistent distinction 
of such “genuine or good species.” There are no two 
zoologists, no two botanists, who agree in all cases as 
to which of the nearly related forms of a genus are good 
species, and which are not. All authors have different 
views about them. In the genus Hieraciwm, for example, 
one of the commonest genera of European plants, no less 
than 300 species have been distinguished in Germany alone. 
The botanist Fries, however, only admits 106, Koch only 52, 
as “good species,’ and others accept scarcely 20. The 
differences in the species of brambles (Rubus) are equally 
great. Where one botanist makes more than a hundred 
species, a second admits only about one half of that number, 
a third only five or six, or even fewer species. The birds of 
Germany have long been very accurately known. Bechstein, 
in his careful “Natural History of German Birds,” has dis- 
tinguished 367 species, L. Reichenbach 379, Meyer and Wolff 
406, and Brehm, a clergyman learned in ornithology, dis- 
tinguishes even more than 900 different species. 
Thus we see that here, and, in fact, in every other domain 
of systematic zoology and botany, the most arbitrary pro- 
ceedings prevail, and, from the nature of the case, must 
prevail. For it is quite impossible accurately to distinguish 
varieties and races from so-called “ good species.” Varieties 
are commencing species. The variability or adaptability of 
species, under the influence of the ‘struggle for life, necessi- 
tates the continual and progressive separation or differentia- 
tion of varieties, and the perpetual delimitation of new forms. 
Whenever these are maintained throughout a number of 
