676 THE AMERICAN NATURALIST. [Vou XXXII. 
and, avoiding a detailed history of the subject, treat it somewhat 
abstractly in its general bearings ; for the question, you will 
admit, is one about which we should occasionally ask ourselves 
what is probably or possibly true, without, however, expecting, 
in most respects, to be able to reach positive conclusions. What 
do we mean by species? Do species really exist in nature, or 
are they created by us for our own convenience? As I do not 
pretend to be in the position of a philosopher, but approach the 
subject as a very commonplace sort of a botanist, the word 
species, as used by me, means simply species as understood 
by the systematic botanist, and indirectly by those working in 
other departments of botany who are obliged to depend to a 
considerable extent upon the limitations of species as defined 
by systematists. 
The publication of the Origin of Species in 1859, a date 
which marks the fall of the old school and the rise of the new, 
is sufficient to show that it is not probable that any other period 
of fifty years in the future will have the same comparative his- 
torical importance, as far as the question of the conception of 
species is concerned, as the fifty years we are now commemo- 
rating. Had we asked any of the botanical members of the 
Association in 1848 what they meant by species, they would 
have replied, most of them without reserve, a few with some 
hesitation, that in the beginning God created all species as he 
intended them to be, and that, by searching, the naturalist could 
find them out. Just how they recognized species when they 
saw them would have been very hard for them to say, as they 
did not agree in their standards; but they would probably all 
have agreed in saying that the recognition of species was 4 
matter of individual judgment, one’s own judgment, of course, 
being better than that of anyone else. The sceptic at that 
time could not have failed to notice the frequency with which 
what was home-made was confused with what was God-given. 
Before 1859 creation was one vast pudding, in which the spe- 
cies had been placed like plums by an Almighty hand, and the 
naturalists, sitting in a corner like greedy little Jack Horners, 
put in their thumbs and pulled out the plums and cried, “ See 
what a great naturalist am I — I have found a new species r 
