Species and Varieties: Their Origin by Mutation

Abstract

IT is not surprising that the first edition of De Vries's lectures in America should be followed by a second after the lapse of a year. All the misprints that we pointed out in our review of the first edition have been corrected; and even our suggestion that uniformity in the termination of the adjectives derived from such terms as physiology was desirable has been adopted. But, curiously enough, the uniformity is intra-verbal and not inter-verbal; for whilst the physiologics and physiologicals of the first edition appear as physiologics in the second, and whilst the same course has been followed with the adjectival forms of morphology anl pakeontology, the empirics and empiricals of the first edition appear as empiricals in the second. We condemn the manner in which this uniformity has been introduced. We are perfectly aware that morphologic is correct, and that morphological is hybrid and redundant, containing as it does a Greek and a Latin adjectival. termination, but we hold that the former is ugly and that the latter is not. If the customary termination is allowed in the case of empirical, on what grounds is it refused in that of physiological? If in our choice of the forms of terms we have to choose between those with the meaning and sound of which we have become familiar, be they never so hybrid, and those forms of them that we are told are strictly logic, let us by all means choose the former.

Species and Varieties: Their Origin by Mutation.

Lectures delivered at the University of California. Second Edition, Corrected and Revised. By H. De Vries; edited by D. T. MacDougal. Pp. xviii + 847. (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co.; London: Kegan Paul and Co., Ltd., 1906.)