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The Darwinian Theory of the Transmutation of Species
The Darwinian Theory of the Transmutation of Species Author:Robert Mackenzie Beverley Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. Mr Darwin's Censure Of Species. We have seen Mr Darwin's statement of species, and have considered also the opinions of several celebrated natur... more »alists on the same subject; we now have to examine Mr Darwin's arguments for opposing the received opinion. His first exception to the acknowledgment of species is based on the great difficulty which he affirms there is in determining correctly the species of several plants,' there are genera in which the species present an inordinate amount of variation ; and hardly two naturalists can agree which forms to rank as species, and which as varieties. We may instance Rubus, Rosa, and Hieracium among plants, and several genera of insects' (48). On this theme—the perplexity of the naturalists—he much enlarges : ' Mr H. C. Watson has marked for me 182 British plants, which are considered as varieties, but which nevertheless have been ranked by botanists as species. Under genera Mr Babington gives 251 species, whereas Mr Bentham gives only 112, a difference of 139 doubtful forms.' Well, let it be so. Let these learned gentlemen and a great many more puzzle themselves in framing their decrees about the species of plants; but are we then to come to this conclusion, that species has no real existence in nature because Messrs H.C. Watson and Babington have bewildered themselves in endeavouring to make proper distinctions ? and in an abstruse subject, because there are many opinions and considerable disagreement, shall we get rid of the difficulty by boldly affirming that the subject itself is altogether ideal, and therefore may be dismissed as imaginary ? By this mode of argument we might clear the stage of many hard questions in physics, and many disputes in chemistry and geology might thus be very conveniently settled. Great i...« less