RELATIONSHIP OF SPECIES. 443 



Darwin held, and this view is often quoted, that the results 

 of hybridization depended on " chance resemblances in the re- 

 productive organs." This has always struck me as a very 

 unsatisfactory explanation of phenomena we evidently know 

 little about ; and which probably are governed, like others, by 

 some natural law. I should have imagined that the reproductive 

 organs were the bedrock of relationship, and that it would be 

 the other similarities or dissimilarities due to evolution, through 

 environment and habitat, that might be more correctly held to 

 be " chance ones." 



It would indeed seem that anatomical tests, as used to 

 demonstrate the divergences of the larger groups and families, 

 may not be always sufficiently evident or stable enough to 

 be depended on to differentiate between some of the more 

 closely allied species. It would seem feasible to assume that 

 before there is any change in structure there may occur a certain 

 invisible change, or tendency to change, in the general essences 

 {(piaiq) of individual branches of a group ; brought about perhaps 

 by changes of environment and food during longer or shorter 

 periods of separation ; and which after a time might or might 

 not become observable in changes of structure. I am of opinion 

 that this change of essence is, in the latter case, only observable 

 to man in change of habits and actions. Animals themselves, who 

 unlike man cannot apparently observe, discern these changes by, 

 probably, the sense of smell ; while man, who to a great extent 

 has lost this power but gained that of observation, might, if so 

 minded, find in this latter some compensation. As suggested 

 above, may not a blood change take place without any structural 

 change, and equally may not this latter eventuate without any 

 inward change of what the old naturalists styled " essence," and 

 which we generally term " germ plasm " ? 



Without wishing in this article to enter, especially dogmati- 

 cally, into any unduly controversial matter, and mindful of the 

 fact that, not being an anatomist or scientific authority, it may 

 appear presumptuous on my part to even discuss these matters, I 

 think one might expect that, had more attention been given to 

 these points, such anomalies in classification, or what appear to 

 be such, would not have existed without comment as long as 

 they have, or perhaps even have been made at all ; and which in 



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