specialize 
2t. To mention specially or in detail; partic- 
ularize; specify, 
liur Saviour specialising and nominating the places. 
Sheldon, .Miracles (1010). p. ail. 
II. intraiix. To act in some special way; pur- 
sue a special course or direction; take a spe- 
cific turn or bent. 
That some cells have specialised on the amoeboid char- 
acter is seen in the so-called myeloplaxes. 
Lancet, 1889, II. 035. 
Also spelled Kiii'dnlise. 
specializer (spesVal-I-zer), . One who makes 
a specialty of anything; a specialist. Also 
spelled specialist*. The Nation. 
specially (spesh'al-i), adv. [< ME. spatially, 
K/ici-iallirlic; < SpeOHH + -I;/' 2 . Doublet, of MM- 
ritilh/.~\ 1. In a special manner; specifically; 
particularly; exceptionally; especially. 
Thay snld be clene of euery vyce, 
And. xpeciallie, of Couatyce. 
Lander, Dewtie of Kyngis (E. E. T. 8.), 1. 401. 
The earth ... of Scripture generally is specially the 
dry land. Hainan, Nature and the Bible, p. 101. 
2. For a particular reason or purpose; by spe- 
cial or exceptional action or proceeding: as, a 
meeting specially called ; an officer specially des- 
ignated. 
The Latin tongue lived on in Britain after the with- 
drawal of the legions, but it lived on, as it lives on in 
modern countries, as a book-language specially learned. 
E. A. Freeman, Amer. Lects., p. 124. 
specialty (spesh'al-ti), ii. ; pi. specialties (-tiz). 
[< ME. specialte, < OF. specialte, speciaitte, espe- 
cialte, especiaiite, etc., a more vernacular tana 
of special ite, eapecialite, etc., speciality: see spe- 
ciality.] 1. The fact or condition of being 
special or particular; particularity of origin, 
cause, use, significance, etc. [Bare.] 
And that they that be ordeynyd to sette messys bryug 
them be ordre and continuelly tyl alle be serued, and not 
inordinatly, And thorow affeccion to personys or by spe- 
ciatte. Babees Book (E. E. T. 8.), p. 330. 
It is no denial of the specialty of vital or psychical phe- 
nomena to reduce them to the same elementary motions 
as those manifested in cosmic phenomena. 
O. a. Lewes, Probs. of Life and Mind, II. vl. 35. 
2. The special or distinctive nature of any- 
thing; essence; principle; groundwork. [Rare.] 
The specialty of rule hath been neglected. 
Shot., T. and C., i. 3. 78. 
3. A special quality or characteristic; a dis- 
tinguishing feature ; a speciality. See special- 
ity, 1. 
The Last Supper at San Marco is an excellent example 
of the natural reverence of an artist of that time, with 
whom reverence was not, as one may say, a specialty. 
II. James, Jr., Trans. Sketches, p. 298. 
4. A special or particular matter or thing; 
something specific or exceptional in character, 
relation, use, or the like. 
Acosta numbreth diuerse strange specialties, excepted 
from the generall Rules of Natures wonted course. 
Purchas, Pilgrimage, p. 872. 
5. A special employment or pursuit ; a distinct 
occupation or division of duty or interest ; that 
which one does especially, either by choice or 
by assignment. 
As each individual selects a special mode of activity for 
himself, and aims at improvement in that specialty, he 
finds himself attaining a higher and still higher degree of 
aptitude for it. 
Dr. Carpenter, Correlation and Conserv. of Forces, p. 410. 
6. A special product or manufacture; some- 
thing made in a special manner or form, or es- 
pecially characteristic of the producer or of the 
place of production : as, a dealer in specialties : 
also, an article to which a dealer professes to 
Eay special attention or care, or which is al- 
;ged to possess special advantages in regard 
to quality, quantity, or price : as, fountain-pens 
a specialty. See the second quotation under 
speciality, 2. 7. In laic, an instrument under 
seal, containing an express or implied agree- 
ment for the payment of money. The word has 
also been loosely used to include obligations or debts 
upon recognizance, judgments and decrees, and statutes, 
because these, being matter of record, rank in solemnity, 
conclusiveness, and endurance with free contracts under 
seal. 
Let specialties be therefore drawn between us. 
Shalt., T. of the 8., ii. I. 127. 
All instruments under seal, of record, and liabilities 
imposed by statute, are specialties within the meaning of 
the Stat. 21 James I. Wood, On Limitation of Actions, 29. 
specie (spe'sie or -she), . [L. specie, abl. of 
species, kind, formerly much used in the phrase 
in specie, in kind, in ML. in coin : see species.] 
1. As a Latin noun, used in the phrase in spe- 
cie: (a) In kind. 
So a lion is a perfect creature in himself, though it be 
less than that of a buffalo, or a rhinocerote. They differ 
5806 
but in specie; either in the kind is absolute; both have 
their parts, ami either the whole. R. Jonsim, Discoveries. 
You must pay him in rjirrir. Madam ; give him love for 
his wit. Uryden, Mock Astrologer, v. 1. 
Uneconomical application of punishment, though prop- 
er, perhaps, as well in specie as in degree. 
Bentham, Introd. to Morals and Legislation, xvi. 54, note, 
(ft) In coin. See def. "2. Hence, as an English 
noun 2. Coin; metallic money; a medium 
of exchange consisting of gold or silver (the 
precious metals) coined by sovereign author- 
ity in pieces of various standard weights 
and values, and of minor coins of copper, 
bronze, or some other cheap or base metal: 
often used attributively. The earliest coinage of 
specie is attributed to the Lydians, about the eighth cen- 
tury B. C. Previously, and long afterward in many coun- 
tries, pieces of silver and gold (the latter only to a small 
extent) were passed by weight in payments, as lumps of 
silver are still in China. The use of specie as a measure 
of price is based upon the intrinsic value of the precious 
metals as commodities, which has diminished immensely 
since ancient times, but is comparatively stable for long 
peril ids under normal circumstances. In modern civilized 
communities specie or bullion is largely used by banks as 
a basis or security for circulating notes (bank-notes) rep- 
resenting it. In times of great financial disturbance this 
security sometimes becomes inadequate from depletion 
or through excessive issues of notes, and a general sus- 
Sension of specie payments takes place, followed by great 
epreciation of the paper money. General suspensions of 
specie payments occurred in the United States in 1837, 
1867, and 1861, the last, due to the civil war, continuing 
till 1879. Specie payments by British banks were sus- 
pended by law, in consequence of the French wars, from 
1797 to 1823, but were actually resumed by the Bank of 
England in 1821. Similar interruptions of solvency have 
occurred in the other European countries, resulting in 
Austria and Russia in an apparently permanent substitu- 
tion of depreciated paper money for specie in ordinary use 
and reckoning. Specie circular, in U. S. hint., a circu- 
lar issued by the Secretary of the Treasury in July, 183, 
by direction of President Jackson, ordering United States 
agents to receive in future only gold and silver or Trea- 
sury certificates in payment for government lands, 
species (spe'shez), H. ; pi. species. [In ME. 
spece, spice, species, kind, spice (see spice 1 ); in 
mod. E. directly from the L. ; = F. espece, spe- 
cies (especes, coin), = Sp. Pg. especie = It. 
xpezie = G. Dan. Sw. xpecies, species (D. spe- 
cie = Dan. specie, specie), < L. species, a see- 
ing, sight, usually in passive sense, look, form, 
show, display, beauty, an apparition, etc., a par- 
ticular sort, "a species, LL. a special case, also 
spices, drugs, fruits, provisions, etc., ML. also 
a potion, a present, valuable property, NL. also 
coin, < spectre, look, see, = OHG. spelidii, MHO. 
spehen (> It. spiare Pr. Sp. Pg. expiar = OF. 
espier, F. epier : see spa), G. spatien, spy, = 
Gr. dKCTrreaGai, look, = Skt. -\/ spaq, later pflf, 
see. Hence special, especial, specie, specify, spe- 
cious, spice, etc. From the same L. verb are ult. 
E. spectacle, aspect, expect, inspect, prospect, re- 
spect, suspect, etc., respite, despise, suspicion, 
etc., and the second element in aiisjtice, frontis- 
piece, etc.] 1. An appearance or representa- 
tion to the senses or the perceptive faculties ; 
an image presented to the eye or the mind. 
According to the Roman Catholic doctrine of transnb- 
si initiation, the species, the outward and visible forms or 
the appearance of bread and wine in the eucharist, are 
the accidents only of bread and wine severally, the sub- 
stance no longer existing after consecration. See inten- 
tional species, below. 
The sun, the great eye of the world, prying into the re- 
cesses of rocks and the hollowness of valleys, receives 
species or visible forms from these objects. 
Jer. Taylor, Works (ed. 1835), I. 782. 
Wit ... is no other than the faculty of imagination in 
the writer, which searches over all the memory for the 
species or ideas of those things which it designs to repre- 
sent. Uryden. 
By putting such a rubric into its Missal, the church of 
Milan sought to express nothing more than that the acci- 
dents or species of the sacrament are broken. 
Rode, Church of our Fathers, i. 125. 
2f. Something to be seen or looked at ; a spec- 
tacle or exhibition ; a show. 
Shows and species serve best with the people. Bacon. 
3. [Tr. of Gr. cldof .] In logic, and hence in ordi- 
nary language, a class included under a higher 
class, or, at least, not considered as including 
lower classes ; a kind ; a sort ; a number of in- 
dividuals having common characters peculiar 
to them. 
Ther is a privee spece of pride that waiteth first to be 
salewed er he wol salewe. Chaucer, Parson's Tale. 
Different essences alone . . . make different species. 
Locke, Human Understanding, III. vi. 35. 
It is well for thee that ... we came under a conven- 
tion to pardon every species of liberty which we may take 
with each other. Scott, Redgauntlet, letter iii. 
A poor preacher being the worst possible species of a 
poor man. W. M. Baiter, New Timothy, p. 222. 
4. One of the kinds of things constituting a 
combined aggregate or a compound ; a distinct 
species 
constituent part or element ; an instrumental 
means : as, the s/n <v>.< of a compound medicine. 
[Now rare in this medical sense, and obsolete 
or archaic in others.] 
In Algebra, Species are those Letters, Characters, Notes, 
or Marks which represent the Quantities in any Equation 
or Demonstration. 
E. Phillips, New World of Words (ed. 1706). 
5. Iii Mnl., that which is specialized or differ- 
entiated recognizably from anything else of 
the same genus, family, or order; an individual 
which differs, or collectively those individuals 
which differ, specifically from all the other 
members of the genus, etc., and which do not 
differ from one another in size, shape, color, 
and so on, beyond the limits of (actual or as- 
sumed) individual variability, as those ani- 
mals and plants which stand in the direct re- 
lation of parent and offspring, and perpetuate 
certain inherited characters intact or with that 
little modification which is due to conditions of 
environment. Species is thus practically, and for pur- 
poses of classification, the middle term between gemts on 
the one hand and individual (or specimen) on the other ; 
and only the latter can be said in strictness to have ma- 
terial existence, so that species, like <ji : mtx, etc., is in this 
sense an abstract conception. It is also an assured fact 
in biology that no given stock or lineage breeds perfectly 
true In all its individuals ; the line of descent is always 
marked by modification of characters (due to the inter- 
action between heredity and environment); the whole 
tendency of such modification is toward further speciali- 
zation, in the preservation of the more useful and the 
extinction of the less useful or the useless characters, and 
thus to the gradual acquirement, by insensible incre- 
ments, of differences impressed upon a plastic organism 
from without which is as much as to say that new spe- 
cies have always been in process of evolution, and still 
continue to be so developed. (See biological senses of 
evolution, selection, survival, and variation.) Such evolu- 
tion has in fact been arrested at some point for every spe- 
cies once existent whose members have perished in time 
past ; and of those specific forms whose adaptation to their 
environment has fitted them to survive till the present 
some are tending to perpetuation and some to extinction, 
but all are subject to incessant modification, for better or 
worse. (See atavism, reversion, 2, retrograde, a., 8, degra- 
dation, 7, , and parasitism, 2.) Such are theviewstaken by 
nearly all biologists of the present day, in direct opposition 
to the former opinion of a special creation, which pro- 
ceeded upon the assumption that all species of animals 
and plant i. such as we find them actually to be, came into 
existence by creative flat at some one time, and have since 
been perpetuated with little if any modification. In con- 
sequence of the fact that the greatest as well as the least 
differences in organisms are of degree and not of kind, no 
rigorous and unexceptionable definition of tpecies is pos- 
sible In either the animal or the vegetable kingdom ; and 
in the actual naming, characterizing, and classifying of spe- 
cies naturalists differ widely, some reducing to one or two 
species the same series of individuals which others describe 
as a dozen or twenty species. (See lumper, 3, splitter, 2.) 
This, however, is rather a nomenclatural than a doctrinal 
difference. The difficulty of deciding in many cases, and 
the impossibility of deciding in some, what degree of 
difference between given specimens shall be considered 
specific, and so formally named in the binomial system, 
have led to the introduction of several terms above and 
below the species (see submenus, subspedts, conspecies, va- 
riety, race*, 5 (a) (b), intergrade, v. i .), and also to a modi- 
fication of the binomial nomenclature (see polynomial, 
2, and trinomial). Two tests are commonly applied to 
the discrimination between good species and mere sub- 
species or varieties : (1) the individuals of thoroughly 
distinct species do not interbreed, or, if they are near 
enough to hybridize, their progeny is usually infertile, so 
that the cross is not in perpetuity : the horse and ass offer 
a good case in point; (-) the specific distinctions do not 
vanish by insensible degrees when large series of speci- 
mens from different geographical localities or geological 
horizons are available for comparison ; for, should char- 
acters assumed to be distinctive, and therefore specific, 
be found to grade away under such scrutiny, they are by 
that fact proved to be non-specific, and the specimens in 
question are reducible to the rank of conspecies, subspe- 
cies, varieties, or races. Attempts which have been made 
to separate mankind into several species of the genus Homo 
fail according to both of the criteria above stated. To 
these may be added, in judging the validity of an alleged 
species, the third premise, that stable specific forms are 
evolved by or in the course of natural selection only ; for 
all the countless stocks or breeds resulting from artificial 
selection, however methodically conducted, tend to re- 
vert when left to themselves, and also hybridize freely ; 
they are not therefore in perpetuity except under culti- 
vation, and are no species in a proper sense, though their 
actual differences may have become, under careful selec- 
tion, far greater than those usually accounted specific or 
even generic. (See dog, rosei.) Taking into account geo- 
logical succession in time as well as geographical distri- 
bution in space, and proceeding upon accepted doctrines 
of the evolution of all forms of animal and vegetable life 
from antecedent forms, it is evident, first, that " species " 
is predicable only by means of the "missing links" in the 
chains of genetic relationships ; for, were all organisms 
that have ever existed before our eyes in their actual evo- 
lutionary sequences, we should find no gap or break in 
the whole series ; but, secondly, that development along 
numberless diverging lines of descent with modification 
has in fact resulted (through obliteration of the consecu- 
tive steps in the process) in the living fauna and flora of 
the globe, in respect of which not only specific, but ge- 
neric, ordinal, and still broader distinctions are easily and 
certainly predicable. It does not appear that any ani- 
mal or plant has always maintained what we now find its 
specific character to be ; yet the persistence of * 
forms under no greater variation than that usually 
some 
at- 
