92 



standard of what should be the badge and token of a species. 

 What he conceives to be worthy of this mark is to him full of 

 reality and distinction. And intermediate specimens, or a certain 

 proportion of intermediates, are not allowed to break down what 

 nature has built up with notable architecture if not always with 

 assured security. He is unterrified by variations, undaunted by 

 numbers of forms. If nature directs the way that way must be 

 followed notwithstanding a lion in every path. Doctor Gray, it 

 appears, took many a short cut, but did not altogether escape 

 the lions after all. And it is not to be supposed that the later 

 author has come off without scratch or scar. A critic unfamiliar 

 with the subject matter of this treatment might charge the author 

 with having missed the highways in the byways. But this, we 

 are convinced, cannot at all truthfully be said. Neither can it be 

 said that his cartography is in all respects so true that the trav- 

 eler may not too confidently always consult his guideposts. The 

 future can alone determine this. Here it may be said that the 

 substantial soundness of the work we expect the future to confirm. 



Species, varieties, forms are indeed crowded upon these pages 

 at the risk or with the certainty of bewildering the super- 

 ficial student ; yet nature herself is bewildering, and are not 

 nature's facts more to be regarded than that taxonomic jugglery 

 which would make the outlines of these facts either by elision or 

 by emphasis falsely legible to the inquiring mind ? And these 

 lesser forms, although insisted on, are not mantled with any great 

 dignity of ta.xonomic import. They are fixed only by a loosely 

 fitting English name and may be taken or left by the student as 

 the tenor of his mind may guide. 



And as for these new species, what of them ? What of species 

 in general ? Are we to lose them altogether in some wide- 

 sweeping and misty conception of the instability of all organic 

 forms? Some modern utterances seem almost to bear this mean- 

 ing. Some taxonomic work would seem to mark the discovery 

 of a mysterious species-solvent capable of reducing the subject 

 matter of genera into veritable mushes of abstraction. In the 

 method of this new aster book we welcome an emphatic protest 

 against such robbery of nature. 



