THE SHASTA DAISY 



As Professor Coulter has recently said, it is 

 largely a matter of definition. 



We shall have occasion to discuss this phase 

 of heredity more fully in another connection. In 

 the meantime, for our present purpose, it suffices 

 to recall that biologists of every school will admit 

 the force of the general statement that heredity 

 is the sum of past environments, and — to make the 

 specific application — that our Japanese daisies and 

 our German and American daisies are different 

 because long generations of their ancestors have 

 lived in different geographical territories and 

 therefore have been subject to diverse environing 

 conditions. 



In a word, then, the Shasta Daisy which stands 

 today as virtually a new creation, so widely dif- 

 ferent from any other plant that no botanist would 

 hesitate to describe it as a new species, owes its 

 existence to the bringing together of conflicting 

 hereditary tendencies that epitomize the ancestral 

 experiences gained in widely separated geograph- 

 ical territories. 



Without the aid of man, the plants that had 

 found final refuge in Europe and America and 

 Japan respectively, would never have been brought 

 in contact, and so the combination of traits that 

 built up the Shasta Daisy would never have been 

 produced. 



[33] 



