93 



Species, whatever they may be or may not be, press themselves 

 before us with some invincible individuality which is their suffi- 

 cient proof Imprisoned in definitions, shackled by authority, 

 ridiculed, nevertheless, by due process of time, the repression falls 

 aside. So we have seen in many an instance, so we see here. 



And if in the ultimate reach of our philosophy its teaching 

 should be that these species in their varied and varying forms exist 

 by reason of an infinity which lies back of nature, which nature is 

 ever seething to express, then may we wisely restrain our too ready 

 disbelief in the numbers of species which a genus may spread 

 before us. 



But the individual, the final unit, having likewise its manifold 

 forms of expression, a double complexity enters into the taxo- 

 nomic problem which, in large groups of closely related forms no 

 single study of a single mind can be expected wholly to resolve. 



In this treatment o( Aster it is fully possible that the species- 

 net has in cases been too finely meshed to capture much more 

 than the individual, and while we doubt not that many species of 

 the group yet remain to be added, some now admitted may have 

 to be withdrawn. 



Some of these studies have had much to do with selected 

 colonies of plants. The consistent behavior and organic dis- 

 tinction of such colonies viewed at close range might easily 

 lead the systematist astray. As evidence of true specific segre- 

 gation they may indeed be wholly deceptive. It is not difficult 

 to conceive that such an assemblage might be founded from a 

 single aberrant individual by a process of undisturbed inter-breed- 

 ing by which the aberrency had been established in the enlarging 

 colony. This is variation protected by isolation, and the evidence 

 of possibilities rather than of fixed results. Should the process 

 of expansion early eliminate the factor of isolation the features of 

 the localized colony should readily pass back into the parent type. 



Here, if anywhere, the test of a mature species must be found 

 — the non-transformability of its individuals or their immediate 

 generations under any conditions of environment into the next 

 most nearly related form of accredited specific rank. Intermedi- 

 ate forms, however, are not necessarily by any means to be taken 



