Abstract
ONE should have thought that a meeting of the Palæontological Society of America was scarcely a propitious occasion for promulgating as a newly discovered law that a body equals the sum of all its parts. As your reviewer has rightly remarked (NATURE, p. 286), it has been said before that every organism is made up of a great number of characters, each of which is in a state of flux. The obvious fact that any species has more than one differential character (of which we use only those which take our fancy) never had need of rediscovery, but it has occasionally been neglected, merely not thought of, sometimes with appalling consequences, as, for instance, it has been solemnly pleaded that if one character distinguishes a species, two should make a genus.
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GADOW, H. Multiple-Character Evolution. Nature 96, 370 (1915). https://doi.org/10.1038/096370d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/096370d0
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