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Viola tricolor has three subspecies, which have been elevated to the rank of species by some authors, and which may here be called, for brevity's sake, by their binary names. One is the typical V. tricolor, with broad flowers, variously colored and veined with yellow, purple and white. It occurs in waste places on sandy soil.
But in the sixteenth century most of our present varieties of beets were already in cultivation. Caspar Bauhin gives a list of the beets of his time and it is not difficult to recognize in it a large series of subspecies and varieties and even of special forms, which are still cultivated.
The first is the discovery of a subspecies with new desirable qualities. The second is the transformation of the original small and woody apple into a large, fleshy and palatable variety. Subspecies, or what we now call elementary species were not produced by man; nature alone creates new forms, as van Mons has it.
All swarms of elementary species are the remains of far larger initial groups. All species containing only a few subspecies may be supposed to have thrown off at the outset far more numerous lateral branches, out of which however, the greater part have been lost, being unfit for the surrounding conditions.
He was a fine beast, jet-black in coat, with white markings on the face, red-brown ears, and horns sweeping up and back scimitar fashion. He stood four feet and six inches at the shoulder, and his horns were the second best ever shot in British East Africa. This beast has been described by Heller as a new subspecies, and named Rooseveltii.
Of course widely distributed plants are as a rule richer in subspecies than forms with limited distribution, and the former must have had a better chance to be taken into cultivation than the latter. In many cases, especially with the more recent cultivated species, man has deliberately chosen variable forms, because of their greater promise.
Linnaeus called them Primula veris, and recognized three types as pertaining to this species, but Jacquin and others have elevated these subspecies to the full rank of species. They now bear the names of Primula elatior with larger, P. officinalis with smaller flowers, and P. acaulis.
Darwin tried to show that the links which bind species to genera are of the same nature as those which determine the relationship of subspecies and varieties. If an origin by natural laws is conceded for the latter, it must on this ground be granted for the first also. In this discussion he simply returned to the pre-Linnean attitude.
Hitherto varieties and subspecies have never been clearly defined, or when they have been, it was not by physiological, but only by morphological research. And the claims of these two great lines of inquiry are obviously very diverging.
But it is easy to see that this logical law would likewise be without sense or application, were it not based upon a transcendental law of specification, which certainly does not require that the differences existing phenomena should be infinite in number, for the logical principle, which merely maintains the indeterminateness of the logical sphere of a conception, in relation to its possible division, does not authorize this statement; while it does impose upon the understanding the duty of searching for subspecies to every species, and minor differences in every difference.
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