THE SUM OF HIS WORK 



unlike their parents — ^not diflferent enough, to be 

 sure, to belie utterly the familiar doctrine that 

 "like begets like", yet different enough to demon- 

 strate, seemingly, that a new species may arise 

 from the loins, so to speak, of the old ones. 



However vaguely the laws or principles of 

 heredity involved might be understood; however 

 far from understanding the precise method of pro- 

 duction of the new forms the general public might 

 be, the tangible fact that widely divergent forms 

 of plant life might spring from the same sotirce — 

 witness, for example, the brier stems of strikingly 

 different forms or the cluster of utterly different 

 leaves grown from the seed of one plant — ^was 

 made clear beyond misunderstanding. 



And this constituted, in the minds of many lay- 

 men, a clearer and more cogent argument for the 

 truth of the doctrine of evolution than could have 

 been found in any amount of theorizing or in the 

 presentation of any number of illustrations drawn 

 from the records of fossil forms or the theoretical 

 reconstruction of the genealogies of species of past 

 eras. 



The arguments of the paleontologist and the 

 embryologist; even the arguments of the theoret- 

 ical botanist and biologist — these lay mostly be- 

 yond the ken of the man in the street. But he 

 could readily enough understand the simple de- 



[171] 



