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Updated: May 8, 2025
From this discussion we may infer that the chances of discovering new mutating species are great enough to justify the utmost efforts to secure them. It is only necessary to observe large numbers of plants, grown under circumstances which allow the best opportunities for all the seeds. And as nature affords such opportunities only at rare intervals, we should make use of artificial methods.
In my opinion it is the struggle for life which is the cause of this apparent rarity; which is nothing else than the premature death of all the individuals that so vary from the common type of their species as to be incapable of development under prevailing circumstances. It is obviously without consequence whether these deviations are of a fluctuating or of a mutating nature.
More than twenty types could be distinguished and seeds were saved from a number of them, in order to ascertain whether they are constant, or whether perhaps a main stem in a mutating condition might be found among them. If this should prove to be the case, the relations between the observed forms would probably be analogous to those between the O. lamarckiana and its derivatives.
And the sky is cracking and falling, as you have seen for yourself. The effects are already being felt. Gamma radiation is flooding through the gaps; the quick-breeding viruses are mutating through half the world, faster than the Medical Art can control them, so that millions of us are sneezing and choking and dying, too, for lack of antibiotics and proper care.
Only those lines of the main pedigree which have retained this capacity would have a future; all others would die out without any chance of progression. If, on the other hand, mutability is not permanent, but a periodic condition, all lines of the genealogic tree must be assumed to show alternatively mutating and constant species.
If mutability is permanent, it is manifest that the whole pedigree of the animal and vegetable kingdom is to be considered as built up of main mutable lines, and that the thousands of constant species can only be taken to represent lateral branches of the genealogic tree. These lateral branches would have lost the capacity of mutating, possessed by all their ancestors.
There is no danger that lamarckiana might die out from the act of mutating, nor that the mutating strain itself would be exposed to ultimate destruction from this cause. In older swarms, such as Draba or Helianthemum, no such center, around which the various forms are grouped, is known. Are we to conclude therefore that the main strain has died out?
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