﻿Characters as Adaptive and Specific. 257 



other, where is the consistency in maintaining that it 

 must "necessarily" hold as regards the intermediate 

 division, species? Truly the shade of Darwin may 

 exclaim, " Save me from my friends." And truly 

 against logic of this description a follower of Darwin 

 must find it difficult to argue. If one's opponents 

 were believers in special creation, and therefore stood 

 upon some definite ground while maintaining this 

 difference between species and all other taxonomic 

 divisions, there would at least be some issue to argue 

 about. But when on the one hand it is conceded 

 that species are merely arbitrary divisions, which 

 differ in no respect as to the process of their evolution 

 from either varieties or genera, while on the other 

 hand it is affirmed that there is thus so great a 

 difference in the result, all we can say is that our 

 opponents are entangling themselves in the meshes 

 of a sheer contradiction. 



Or, otherwise stated, specific characters differ from 

 varietal characters in being, as a rule, more pronounced 

 and more constant : on this account advocates of 

 utility as universal apply the doctrine to species, 

 while they do not feel the " necessity " of applying it 

 to varieties. But now, generic and all higher char- 

 acters are even more constant and more pronounced 

 than specific characters — not to say, in many cases, 

 more generally diffused over a larger number of 

 organisms usually occupying larger areas. There- 

 fore, a fortiori, if for the reasons above stated evolu- 

 tionists regard it as a necessary deduction from the 

 theory of natural selection that all specific char- 

 acters must be useful, much more ought it to be 

 a necessary deduction from this theory that all generic, 



II. S 



