IV. GRADES OF SPECIES. 35 
species has since been subdivided. Literally, the name in books 
still means the whole or avy part of the whole, or it is used ina 
more restricted sense to mean one special part exclusively, — 
a logical equally as a mathematical absurdity. 
It would certainly have been the wiser course, always to keep 
up the Linnean specific name for the original aggregate species, 
and thus to keep it still applicable to all and any of the included 
forms ; and to give a new name to each of the segregate species, 
not excepting the type form itself, whether real or suppositious. 
The Linnean name would thus have retained his own meaning 
and application of it, and would have been so far true and 
constant; while the substituted modern practice makes an 
arbitrary and false limitation of it. But the mere species- 
describers who have most delighted in dividing and re-naming, 
have usually been persons of an unreasoning character of mind, 
and were perhaps seldom capable of seeing how illogical their 
practice was, and how inconvenient to their botanical successors it 
would prove to be. 
In thus pointing out the process of separating original aggregate 
species into more modern segregate species, the name of Linneus 
has been used simply for convenience, and because many of his 
old species have been thus subdivided, or “ split ” as the process is 
more scornfully designated. But of course the like may be said of 
the aggregate species originally named and described by any other 
botanical describer, which have been subsequently split into segre- 
gates. For instance, many of Robert Brown’s original Australian 
species were probably aggregates ; their short characters having 
been since found applicable to more than one apparent species. 
The same, I am assured by a resident botanist there, is true of 
New Zealand plants named and described by Dr. Hooker, or 
referred by him to the named species of Europe or other 
countries. 
Partly owing to more exact discrimination, but it may be 
feared chiefly under a weak-minded craving for name-notoriety, the 
modern tendency is to subdivide species on differences so slight 
and uncertain that descriptive language now almost fails to make 
