No. 580] 



ORIGIN OF SINGLE CHARACTERS 



195 



My chief purpose in this address is to show what one 

 of these "single" or "least characters" 3 is and what pe- 

 culiar powers and properties it possesses which distin- 

 guish it from other "least characters" and give it a cer- 

 tain individuality and separateness. 



If you read your Lamarck, your Darwin, your Cope 

 afresh with this general conception in mind you will find 

 that throughout biological literature the problem of 

 species has always been an incidental one, a sort of 

 by-problem and relic of the very ancient controversy as 

 to whether species were created suddenly or evolved 

 gradually. The real problem has always been that of 

 the origin and development of characters. Since the 

 "Origin of Species" appeared the terms variation and 

 variability have always referred to single characters; if 

 a species is said to be variable we mean that a consider- 

 able number of the single characters or groups of char- 

 acters of which it is composed are variable. In -botany the 

 long overlooked discovery of Gregor Mendel in 1865 had 

 as its most essential feature the separability of characters 

 in heredity. In paleontology as long ago as 1869 Waagen 

 sharply focused our attention on single phyletic charac- 

 ters as of far greater significance and importance than 

 the matter of local races, varieties, and subspecies. The 

 modern observers in experimental zoology and heredity 

 are far less concerned with "species" than with the sep- 

 arate characters of which the individuals within a species 

 are composed. 



Some naturalists incline to regard the "character" as 

 observable only by certain methods of their own, but it is 

 obvious that since all hereditary "characters" are germi- 

 nal there can be no royal or exclusive road by which we 

 may observe their origin and transformation, for the ger- 

 minal and somatic laws controlling the characters of 



