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outcome of any hasty experiments and ill-digested data, but were 

 the result of seventeen years of the most careful and painstaking 

 work, and a fine example of the best kind of quiet, faithful re- 

 search, removed from the rush of affairs and the demand for im- 

 mediate results, the final conclusion of which fully warranted the 

 time and labor expended. 



As is well known. Professor de Vries found in Lamarck's 

 evening primrose — Oenothera Lamarckiana — a plant most favor- 

 able for observation, though his conclusions are not based on that 

 form alone. The most carefully guarded pedigree cultures were 

 made from the true Lamarckiana type, and the astonishing result 

 developed that among the offspring of these certain forms, to the 

 number of about 4 per cent, showed new and striking differ- 

 ences. In all, more than a dozen new forms were obtained 

 which, if they could be bred at all, bred true to their new char- 

 acters and did not revert to the ancestral Lamarckiana ; these 

 were the mutants, the new elementary species, which had sprung 

 suddenly in a saltatory fashion from the parent stock. The 

 great importance lies in the fact that they were entirely constant 

 to their new characters and were thus not in the class of the 

 merely unstable varieties. It must be remarked that time alone, 

 many generations, of carefully guarded cultures in which acci- 

 dental crossing was an impossibility, together with unimpeach- 

 able records, could adequately establish this momentous fact, 

 that here was a new species, a new form, or whatever you may 

 elect to call it, which had sprung all in one jump from its parental 

 stock, De Vries, then, was the first man who ever saw a new 

 type of organism come into the world and who recorded its 

 advent. 



You naturally ask how unlike were these new forms, a question 

 which is difficult to answer without actual illustrations. How- 

 ever, it may be said that many of them were different enough from 

 their parent stock to be admitted by taxonomists to come within 

 the definition of new species, as species are regarded at the present 

 time. The differences are not the question of mere stature, but 

 of the whole habit of the plant and of the details of the form of 

 both leaves and flowers. But to repeat, it really makes no odds 



