﻿NORTH AMERICAN SPHINGIDiE. 99 



SPECIES 



In the endeavor to form a conception of what constitutes species, our ideas must be 

 separated from the individual, which is merely the representative of species in some 

 one of its special states or conditions. Every mature or perfected being has had an 

 anterior organic history, included in the history of its structural progression from a 

 collection of simple cells to a natural body, possessing individual and distinctive 

 characteristics. No one of its states or conditions constitute species ; neither the perfect 

 insect, nor the pupa, nor the larva, nor the ovum, fulfil in themselves the conception 

 involved in this term, but simply represent the various relations the individual 

 maintains to physical and animated nature, and during the continuance of which 

 its structural and peculiar biography is written. The perfect being is the temporary 

 expression of a thought or conception, involved in the series of actions which 

 constitute in their entity a special and definite creation, and in this state has reached 

 the acme of its perfectibility, a point beyond which it cannot pass ; but, after a 

 variable period, its organic part is broken up, and resolved again into the simple or 

 primary elements of matter. The species or the thought, however, does not cease to 

 exist during the process of organic disintegration of the individual ; and previously to 

 its disappearance or death, it represents its special organism, or rather its species, by 

 means of an ovum, in which the organic actions destroyed in the previous represen- 

 tative are recommenced, and again carried through a series of changes or states to 

 the point of its previous organic perfection. Commencing in the simplest organic 

 state, and continually returning to it to renew a series of predetermined special 

 developments, we have in species a cycle of persistent, ceaseless actions, revolving in 

 their narrow, humble orbit, with all the indications of design, and with comparatively as 

 much invariability as the great planets observe in their appointed paths. It is a 

 conception, inasmuch as from a structureless body or material is evolved in a constant, 

 preordained manner, one having a highly complicated arrangement of organs, whose 

 actions and functions result in the production of phenomena known as those of life. 

 The ovum, in which the organic cycle may be said to have its inception, is endowed 

 with no fortuitous or independent impulse of evolution. Up to the period of its 

 maturity, it has formed an integral and necessary part of some pre-existing natural 

 body ; it is indeed, a component of the organism, quite as much as any other aggre- 

 gation of specialized cells, and partakes of all its characteristics of growth. To endow 

 it with this impulse, not even the procreative act, between the male and female 

 organism, is absolutely imperative, and its specific evolution may be recommenced 

 independently of this extraneous aid, at the inceptive point of the organism with 

 which it has been identified, and continued to the production of a new perfect being. 

 It is of little consequence in how few or many instances this tendency is capable of 



