No. 514] 



ARE SPECIES REALITIES! 



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after season I plagued myself at the rate of sixteen hours 

 per day to accomplish this and other kindred things all 

 relating to the stability or instability of this one species. 

 And how much I accomplished, and yet how absolutely 

 little. I made the characters all right, at least of the 

 adult; unless possibly the special distribution of a few 

 skin pores about the head eluded me. Last of all I even 

 segregated the palatine teeth into groups and dragged 

 them well back toward the throat in true punctatum style. 

 It was easy, given time and the knowledge how. Though 

 alas, while I was corralling this chief character, the whole 

 herd of lesser ones which I had previously rounded up 

 were absolutely certain to escape me. 



In short, my seeming success was abject failure. Char- 

 acters, but never in perfect combination ; and then, not a 

 trace of tendency toward transmission. I found no mor- 

 dant of conditions penetrating enough to bring germ cells 

 into the slightest harmony with my special somatic 

 policies. 



Species unreal! It may be that they are in some 

 ghostly sense toward which my imagination has not wan- 

 dered. It may be that many alleged species are unreal 

 enough. But the majority of those with which I have 

 dealt, although chosen for the very reason of their seem- 

 ing or possible unreality, so to speak, have yet left upon 

 my mind the impression of almost indissoluble entities. 



An exaggerated impression it may be. Had I been 

 collecting facts about geographical races, for example, I 

 might have verged toward other conclusions. But such 

 study, if it makes for a seeming fluidity of nature, is 

 confessedlv but tentative and superficial, and its facts 

 about species are but a part of the facts. Does Mrmlrlian 

 ism, for instance, with its unit characters and its mathe- 

 matics of heredity, make for the unreality of species? Do 

 modern experimentalists claim to be dealing with species 

 as concepts only? 



This leads to a last word. Is it of any importance how 

 we think of species? May we, equally well, think of spe- 

 cies as conveniently segregated groups of more or less 



