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Updated: June 9, 2025
The beginnings of a species, or of a subspecies, are obscure more often than not; and they are rarely to be declared with certainty.
In scientific works it is commonly used to designate the occurrence of subspecies or varieties, and the same is the case in the ordinary use of the term when dealing with cultivated plants. A species may consist of larger or smaller groups of such units, and they may be absolutely constant, never sporting if hybridization is precluded, and nevertheless it may be called highly variable.
It is manifest that these experiences with wild species must find a parallel among cultivated plants. Of course cultivated plants were originally wild and must have come under the general law. Hence we may conclude that when first observed and taken up by man, they must already have consisted of sundry elementary subspecies.
The weight of his authority soon brought this conception to universal acceptance, and up to the present time the prevailing conception of a species has been chiefly based on the definition given by Linnaeus. His species comprised subspecies and varieties, which were in their turn, supposed to have evolved from species by the common method.
It would be a capital idea to try to repeat the history of the begonias or any other hybrid race, making all the described crosses and then recording the results in a manner requisite for complete and careful scientific investigations. Many large genera of hybrid garden-flowers owe their origin to species rich in varieties or in elementary subspecies.
His description was based upon an immature buck and a doe shot by Kermit Roosevelt. The determination of subspecies on so slight evidence seems to me unscientific in the extreme. While the immature males do exhibit the general brown tone relied on by Mr. Heller, the mature buck differs in no essential from the tropical sable. I find the alledged subspecies is not accepted by European scientists.
There are now many subspecies, elementary species, and varieties under cultivation. The oldest of them is known as the "springing flax," in opposition to the ordinary "threshing flax." It has capsules which open of themselves, in order to disseminate the seeds, while the ordinary heads of the flax remain closed until the seeds are liberated by threshing.
I hope that I have succeeded in showing that the difference between elementary species, or, as they are often called, smaller or subspecies, on the one hand and varieties on the other, is quite a marked one. However, in order to recognize this principle it is necessary to limit the term variety, to those propagating themselves by seed and are of pure and not of hybrid origin.
Linnæus, in the eighteenth century, included Homo sapiens in his list of species, recognizing four subspecies in the European, Asiatic, African, and Indian of America. Blumenbach in 1775 added the Malay, thus giving the five types that most of us learned in our school days.
The extreme beauty of this antelope led us to secure a group of them for the Field Museum. The reedbuck is another of the smaller antelopes that carries a beautiful head, and, like nearly all of the antelopes, comes in many varieties, or subspecies.
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