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created Barnacle, and surely deserved a name. Otherwise I should only 
have thought whether the amount of difference and permanence was suffi¬ 
cient to justify a name.” 1 Still earlier he confided to Hooker that after 
describing a set of forms as distinct species, tearing up his manuscript 
and making them one species, tearing that up and making them separate, 
and then making them one again, he had gnashed his teeth, cursed species 
and asked what sin he had committed to be so punished. 2 The general 
situation of the nomenclature question was subsequently hit off by Darwin, 
in a letter written to Asa Gray, November 29, 1859, in which he says: “By 
the way, I met the other day Phillips, the paleontologist, and he asked me, 
‘How do you define a species?’ I answered, ‘I cannot,’ whereupon he said 
‘At last I have found out the only true definition,—- any form which has ever 
had a specific name!’ ” 3 Darwin apparently rested in the position indicated 
by this playful allusion, and neither he nor Lamarck did much towards 
clearing up the subject of classification. They really left the matter in the 
unsatisfactory condition in which they found it, so that we of to-day are 
floundering in the “Slough of Despond” which entangled them and their 
predecessors, and our method of grouping and naming remains the most un¬ 
scientific thing in the scientific world. 
It is only just to observe that Lamarck, while dealing with the species 
question more seriously than did Darwin, was after all of Darwin’s opinion 
as to the ultimate inconclusiveness of all attempts at exact definition. He 
declared that naturalists of his day were extremely troubled to say exactly 
what they meant by a species and gave it as his own decision that “the 
farther we advance in the knowledge of the different organized bodies with 
which almost every part of the surface of the globe is covered, the more does 
our embarrassment increase in determining what should be regarded as 
species, and the greater is the reason for limiting and distinguishing the 
genera.” 4 
Now, although Darwin treated with ridicule the troubles of the species 
makers, he certainly dealt with species in all his own work as if they were 
necessary units in the evolutionary process; and while Lamarck, different 
from Darwin, was not afraid to formulate a definition of species in face of 
the acknowledged difficulties of the matter, it is very doubtful if he regarded 
them, as much as Darwin did, as the direct objects of the evolutionary forces. 
In 1802 he wrote: “I have for a long time thought that species were constant 
in nature and that they were constituted by the individuals which belong to 
1 “Life and Letters,” Vol. II, p. 81. 18S7. 
2 Ibid., p. 40. 
3 “More Letters,” Vol. I, p. 127. 1903. 
4 A. S. Packard, “Lama,rck the Founder of Evolution,” p. 263. 1901. 
