THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 1 9 



the common English pheasants together, said : — " After this the 

 " reader will be ready to inquire, what constitutes a Species ? All 

 " that I can do is to echo the question, what constitutes a Species ?" 

 He had contemplated his birds and marked their great and striking 

 dissimilarity, and concluded that they must be separate Species ; he 

 turned to his books, and the authorities pronounced them separate 

 Species ; he brought them together and they commingled freely, 

 nature in them asserting they were not separate Species, they were 

 but distinct varieties of one Species. Illustrations might be multi- 

 plied indefinitely, but one is sufficient to point the direction. 



Another inquiry we have to make is : If separation for a sufficient 

 length of time will completely extinguish all evidence of original 

 relationship ? There is the so called genus Bos. How long have the 

 humped cattle of the East been separated from the bison of the 

 West ? Is it a thousand years, or five, ten, twenty or a hundred thous- 

 and, who can say ? But bring them together, from any distance or in 

 any of the multitudinous forms of which the genus is composed, and 

 they commingle freely. Their distinctive peculiarities merge and 

 blend until finally lost, proving them to be not Species of a genus, 

 but varieties of a species, and that time and distance have failed to 

 extinguish their original relationship. 



The possibility is that at one time in the world's history, all 

 these various forms of a Species of the present, were represented on 

 the earth by a single form — and that form may have been quite un- 

 like anything of the present — and if it lived under entirely different 

 conditions it undoubtedly would be. But whether the Species 

 originated in single ones or pairs, in a single locality, and spread 

 from there over the globe, or came into existence singly or in pairs, 

 in various localities, or in groups, or in multitudes, is not now pos- 

 sible to prove, and does not seem to be of any consequence . For if 

 they were one in Nature, and identical in internal organization, the 

 result would be the same. If then no amount of divergence in 

 size, form and color, and no length of separation in time, places any 

 obstacle in the way of the ordinary laws of generation, we have got a 

 clear, definite, dividing line for Species, and one that proves 

 Species to be a real and natural entity, quite different from Struc- 

 ture. For seeing that all life of the present, as well as that of the 

 past, is, and has ever been, surrounded by, and in constant contact 

 with, those influences that tend to produce change in Structure, 



