THE PHILIPPINE 
Journal of Science 
C. Botany 
VOL. XI JULY, 1916 No. 4 
NATURAL SELECTION AND THE DISPERSAL OF SPECIES 
By Edwin Bingham Copeland 
(From the College of Agriculture, University of the Philippines, 
Los Banos, P. I.) 
We all cherish and esteem the truth. Those of us engaged in 
educational work and in scientific pursuits are devoted to the 
discovery, understanding, and promulgation of the truth, but 
our effectiveness in this work is somewhat qualified by individual 
and general peculiarities of mental equipment. Aside from the 
individual extremes of attitude, such as, on the one hand, that 
of the man who has such confidence in the stability of the truth 
that he trusts it to rise triumphant after every assault, and, 
on the other hand, that of the miser who treats it as one 
famous miser did his cheese, as something too precious to be 
exposed to the light, there is a very general disposition, based 
on the common love of novelty and contempt for the familiar, 
to value truth in proportion as it is unknown, unfamiliar, or 
unaccepted. The bizarre always attracts attention. Nobody 
publishes the fact that two equal two, or that two plus two 
equal four ; and the demonstration that the square on the hypoth- 
enuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two 
sides of a right-angled triangle would attract no attention and 
is only published in elementary geometries. On the other hand, 
a plausible argument against the last proposition would be 
published and widely circulated and would attract considerable 
attention, even if it were not believed. No one pays any 
attention to the accepted fact that parallel lines will not meet, 
but a geometry based on the assumption that they will meet 
is widely heralded. 
The general principle of natural selection has been accepted 
as an established fact for the past fifty years, and for twenty or 
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