50 THE EVOLUTION OF LIVING BEINGS. 



pings coinciding with our regiments or Linneons; our 

 regiments or Linneons therefore turned out to be 

 purely artificial, to be but conceptions of our mind. 



Now to this view may be objected, that in the for- 

 mer case, our Linneons were internally also different 

 from Nature's Linneons, because ours contained no 

 hybrids, while those of nature did. This is true, but we 

 will perceive this the less, the more we consider — as 

 we use to do — certain characters as essential to esta- 

 blish Linneons, certain others as unessential or, as 

 we usually express it, as to be of varietal value only. 



If we admit f. i. that the Caucasian-mongolian regi- 

 ment or Linneon may „vary" in skin-color from 

 white to yellow, and the Indian-negro one from red to 

 black, we will accept the regiments or Linneons, nature 

 sends back to us, to be sufficiently similar to those, 

 we had made ourselves 25 years ago, to consider them 

 to be unchanged except by sUght variations, too insig- 

 nificant to change our opinion. 



This is no joke; it is a fact which we must constantly 

 keep in mind, that we get the Linnean species, „das Art- 

 hild" {our Linneon) only, by choosing certain characters 

 which we call essential as criteria andby neglecting others; 

 if we considered all characters to be of equal importance 

 we would never have grouped the different types, each 

 Linneon contains, together. 



Of course there are Linneons, consisting apparently 

 of one type only; these arise, as we will see later on, 

 through intra-linneontic crossing and selection of one 

 tjTpe, usually the dominant one; crossing without se- 

 lection leads, as it does in human Linneons, to Linne- 



