320 PLANTS, SEEDS, AND CURRENTS 



great orders, could have been produced on the evolutionary lines 

 implied in the Darwinian theory. To lay down, as the evolutionist 

 does, that the order of development begins with the variety, varieties 

 diverging into species, species into genera, and genera into natural 

 orders, is to reverse the method followed in nature, since it implies 

 that the simpler, least mutable, and least adaptive characters that 

 distinguish the great orders are the last developed. This could 

 never have been. Nature has ever worked from the simple to the 

 complex, from the general to the particular. Had she followed the 

 lines laid down by the Darwinian school of evolutionists, there 

 would be no systematic botany. All would be confusion. There 

 would be no distribution in the sense in which the term is generally 

 understood, and the plant- world would be a world of monstrosities. 



In the differentiation of a generalised type by which natural 

 orders break up into tribes, the tribes into genera, and the genera 

 into species, our systematists have symbolised the process of pro- 

 gressive differentiation of conditions which has taken place in the 

 physical world, and this is the result we should expect in a world 

 where adaptivity reigns supreme. Though we signify our approval 

 of these systems by our daily use of them, we employ language and 

 adopt lines of reasoning that are utterly opposed to all that these 

 systems of classification stand for. In these respects our practice 

 and our theory are as far asunder as the poles — our practice good, 

 our theories indifferent. 



There lies beside me a very useful little book, written by a botanist 

 of authority and intended for the use of students. In keeping with 

 the teaching of the day, it is there explained how in the evolutionary 

 process the natural order is built up by the varieties diverging into 

 species, the species into genera, and the genera into groups of genera 

 or orders, the species being taken as the unit of origin. Yet if we 

 put this theory into practice in our plant-systems it would spell 

 chaos. No typical natural order could be produced by such a 

 method of evolution. The usual process of change in the plant- 

 world, as in the physical world, has been from the general to the 

 particular, and we should be quite as illogical in reversing the process 

 for the plant as we should for its conditions. 



Let the reader take a natural order and endeavour to build it up 

 from one of its own species on the lines suggested by the evolutionist. 

 With the goal before him of the generalised type of the systematist, 

 his theory would desert him at the start. What he would attain, 

 if he persisted in his plan, would be something very different from 

 our natural orders, a highly specialised type of organism nearing its 

 extinction. In these respects our practice belies our theory. Were 

 it not so, our studies of the plant- world would be profitless indeed. 



Yet it is not to be supposed that such a process is not in active 

 operation in nature. Unfortunately for the systematist it is, and 

 all the oddities in the plant-world are to be placed to its credit. 

 But the point emphasised is that this is not the process that has 

 given its impress to the plant-forms of the globe. We live in a 

 differentiating rather than in a specialising world; and although 

 specialisation is common enough, it is very far from being the prin- 



