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Young Daniel Gookin, probably with his brother John, was living at Newport News in 1633, where their father had established a home called "Marie's Mount," for the Dutch sea-captain Peter deVries recorded that he stopped there over night. The Gookins also maintained a plantation, directly across from Newport News on the Nansemond River, at which point the Tristram and Jane called in 1637.
It is his thought that a species may run along uniformly for a long time when, from some cause which he has not determined as yet, instability comes into the species and it varies in quite a number of directions. Each of these variations may be the starting point of a new species. DeVries believes that he has at least half a dozen mutants of his new Evening Primrose.
On his arrival in Virginia, 1633, he anchored off Newport News and visited there the Gookins. Later, when his ship sailed up the James River, he recorded that he stopped at "Littletown," the plantation of George Menefie, an early Virginia attorney, a prosperous planter and, said deVries, "a great merchant, who kept us to dinner and treated us very well."
It is to be noted here, a fact emphasised by DeVries in his earliest publications on the subject, that in nearly all, if not all cases, a mutation does not consist in a peculiarity of a single organ, but in an alteration of the whole plant in every part. In this respect mutations as observed in Oenothera seem to be in striking contrast to the majority of Mendelian characters.
DeVries, who visited the Jersey coast about 1632, at what is supposed to have been Beesley's or Somer's Point, describes high woods coming down to the shore. Even today, immediately back of Somer's Point, there is a magnificent lofty oak forest accidentally preserved by surrounding marsh from the destructive forest fires; and there are similar groves along the road towards Pleasantville.
When they were planted and crossed with each other, and the resulting seeds were again planted, the peculiarity remained constant in all the members of the collection. Here then we have a true variation, not large in amount, but at the same time quite definite, and which from the first remains true. Here are the beginnings, says DeVries, of new species.
In case he came by water, he was bade a final farewell from the planter's wharf. Peter deVries, the Dutch sea-captain and trader, has left some early accounts of hospitality in Virginia. Although he recorded that the Englishmen in Virginia drove a close bargain in trade, and their acumen in that respect could not be surpassed, he was ever warm in praise of their hospitality.
Hugo DeVries, of Amsterdam, believes he has found the answer to this difficulty. Outside of his botanical garden an American species of Evening Primrose had run wild. In looking over a number of these plants he found, every here and there, certain peculiar members of the species. They differed noticeably to the practiced eye from the rest of the group.
They are true from the first; they can live among other members of the species and still come true; they do not need isolation, at least in Wagner's geographical sense. These forms DeVries calls mutations.
DeVries of recent years has revised it, but with distinct modifications, and most biologists pay no attention to it. There is a school of biologists, headed by Weissman, who have come to be known as Neo-Darwinians. These men have insisted that Natural Selection, if properly understood and developed, is quite sufficient to account for the fact of evolution, including the appearance of variations.
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