SPECIES-MONGEKING 367 
had given different names to the same plant in different regions ; 
their unco-ordinated observations tended to obscurity rather 
than hght. 
What is to become of specific Botany I cannot think. I 
have only last week found out that the little Khododendron 
anthopogon described by Don, Walhch, Eoyle, Lindley, 
Hooker and three times by Hooker-fil. is the very old 
Osmanthus pallidus — absolutely identical — not a variety 
even ! I also took up the Indian Vaccinia and found that 
out of 16 species figured in Wight's ^ Icones no less than 9 
were bad and old ! 
Man had not found what nature indeed had denied, a 
common standard for differentiation between species, varieties, 
transitional forms ; nor an independent basis for that ab- 
straction, the specific type, so useful as a label, so dangerous 
as a determinant. The very name conjures up the ancient 
logical battle between Nominahsts and Eeahsts ; and the 
latter day Eealists, perhaps unconscious of their intellectual 
affinities, were in the ascendant, upholding the existence of 
such types, the hving approximations to which constituted 
species. 
Full reahsation of this state of things could only come 
through knowledge at once profound and far reaching such 
as Hooker's, uniting as it did the close personal study of 
entire floras and of the literature that dealt with them, repre- 
senting every kind of region from the Poles to the tropics — 
the Antarctic, New Zealand, Australia, India, the Galapagos 
Islands, Aden, and the Niger, besides the botany of certain 
Arctic voyages, and much of Ceylon and the Cape. Only 
such intimate knowledge, ranging over the widest areas, could 
1 Robert Wight (1796-1872), M.D., of Edinburgh, entered the E.I.C. 
ser\T[ce and became a leading Indian botanist. He was early in touch with 
Sir W. Hooker, in whose botanical periodicals he began to publish his material 
Avhen on furlough after 1831. At the same time he published with Arnott one 
vol. of his Prodromus Florae Peninsulae Indiae Oricntalis. His later work in 
India included inquiry into the cultivation of useful plants and the charge of 
an experimental cotton farm, while at considerable loss to himself he published 
his Illustrations of Indian Botany with coloured, and Icoties Plantarum Indiae 
Orientalis with uncoloured plates, numbering over 2000. 
