The survival of the unlike Author:Liberty Hyde Bailey 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: THE PLANT INDIVIDUAL IN THE LIGHT OP EVOLUTION.1 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BUD-VARIATION, AND ITS BEARING UPON WEISMANX1SM. Whilst the animal and vegetable kingd... more »oms originate at a common point- and are not clearly distinguishable in a number of the lower groups of organic beings, they nevertheless diverge rapidly, and finally become very unlike. I believe that we shall find that this divergence into two co-ordinate branches of organic nature is brought about by the operation of at least two fundamentally distinct laws. There is a most unfortunate tendency, at the present time, to attempt to account for all phenomena of evolution upon some single hypothesis which the observer may think to be operative in the particular group of animals or plants which he may be studying. For myself, I cannot believe that all forms of life are the results of any one law. It is probable that all recent explanations of evolution contain more or less truth, and that one of them may have been the cause of certain developments, whilst others have been equally fundamentally important in other groups oforganisms. If I were a zoologist, and particularly an entomologist, I should hold strongly to the views of Lamarck; but, being a horticulturist, I must accept largely, for the objects which come within the range of my vision, the principles of Darwin. In other words, I believe that both Lamarckism and Darwinism are true; and, in this connection, it is significant to observe that Lamarck propounded his theory from studies of animals, whilst Darwin was first led to his theory from observations of plants. I am willing to admit, also, at least for the sake of argument, that Weismannism, or the Neo- Darwinian philosophy, may be true for some organisms, but it seems to be wholly untenable for plants. Address be...« less