1st. The Law of Heredity, which works to make the progeny resemble their parents. No one doubts the fact of heredity whatever its mechanism may be. Darwin did try to imagine a sufficient mechanism and called it "pangenesis." This theory has been largely discarded; but, whether true or false, it has little direct bearing on the theory of Natural Selection, nor could it invalidate that theory in the least. This law is the conservative factor.

2nd. The Law of Individual Variation. No one doubts that this is a fact, whether he calls the variations "individual variations," "fluctuating varieties" or "mutations." They are all simply variations in the Darwinian sense. Darwin did not explain the origin of variations, nor did he need to. I have little sympathy with those who exclaim that "Natural Selection originates nothing" because it does not tell the cause of variation. When we contemplate the bewildering complexity of the germplasm and the countless hereditary possibilities in each germ cell, the wonder is not that there is variation, but that it is kept within such reasonable limits. This law is the qualitative factor of organic evolution, furnishing differences from which selection may be made.

3rd. The Law of Geometrical Ratio of Increase, by which every species tends to over-populate the earth if its natural ratio is not checked. No one doubts that this is a fact. Indeed it seems to have furnished both Darwin and Wallace with the key with which they each solved the problem of the origin of species. This law is the quantitative factor, furnishing great numbers from which to select.

Having stated these laws and discussed them at length, Darwin set himself the task of ascertaining how they would act and interact in Nature, and found that the necessary result of such action and interaction would be a selection that would result in more and more perfect adaptations to environments and the elimination of the unfit, thus assuring the survival of the fittest or most perfectly adapted forms, and a general advance in complexity and specialization of species. He compared this selection to the artificial selection wrought by man in improving his domestic animals and called it "Natural Selection." It seems to me puerile to object to this comparison, for Darwin pointed out in the most painstaking way the essential differences between the two. They are comparable in a large and true sense.

That a selection of some sort could result from the combined working of these three laws can not be successfully denied, and it was Darwin who proved this to the world. And no name has been proposed for this selection that is more satisfactory to biologists as a whole than "Natural Selection.”

The logic of this course of reasoning seems to me and to many of my zoological, botanical and geological colleagues, unanswerable.

I feel very sure that a large majority of those professionally engaged in the study of biological science would answer the question: "Is Darwin completely shorn of his selection doctrines?" by a decided negative. Some of his ideas have been trimmed to suit the prevailing mode of thought and more complete knowledge; but he is not "shorn.”

In conclusion I must venture to express the hope that the honored friend of Nature, John Burroughs, will not allow an incursion into the field of tonsorial art to divert his attention from that exquisite art with which he has so often delighted an innumerable host of sincere admirers. There are controversial writers galore, and in every field of thought; but few indeed are they who do the work of observing and depicting the lives and habits of our familiar friends of orchard, field and forest with so keen an insight and so sure and felicitous a touch.

THE BOTANY OF THE NEW ENGLAND POETS By DR. NEIL E. STEVENS

BUREAU OF PLANT INDUSTRY

ODERN New England poets are necessarily excluded from this

MODE

discussion. What Amy Lowell writes may be poetry, but her references to plants are certainly not botany. Adequate and appropriate tribute1 has moreover been paid to her masterly ignorance of things botanical as displayed in a vers libre effusion on sugar printed in The Independent (December 29, 1917) in which the familiar red table beet is forced to assume the chemical and horticultural rôle of the coarse, whitish, turnip-like root known commercially as the sugar beet. To quote in part:

Wide plains,

With little red balls hidden under them,

Beets like a hidden pavement underneath the plains.

And there still the blood-skinned beets,

Waiting to be crushed, pulped, and eaten,
Thunder sugar-blood sugar-

In contrast, attention will be confined to the New England poets in the most limited sense, that is to the poets of that little group, the most distinguished in American letters, usually known as the Cambridge School, namely, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, and Lowell. It is perhaps more than a coincidence that these men were the contemporaries and most of them the friends of that master mind of New England botany, Asa Gray.2 Indeed it was of Gray that Lowell wrote: Just Fate, prolong his life well-spent

3The occasion was Professor Gray's seventy-fifth birthday. A silver memorial vase inscribed with the legend,

Bryant's birth and early life in the Berkshires place him among the New England poets though not in the Cambridge school, and his repute as a nature poet might indicate that he would be entitled to special botanical consideration. In only a few of his poems, however, does one find evidence of accurate botanical knowledge. "The Death of the Flowers," "The Old Man's Council," "The Fountain," and "To the Fringed Gentian," though, show his interest in and love for flowers.

Emerson, although not primarily a poet, belongs of course to the Cambridge school, and there is evidence of considerable botanical knowledge in his poems. In "Nature" for example he names over forty species of plants. If, however, Emerson had been a botanist, and he would have made a very good one, he would not have been a systematist. In 1858 few botanists even took the trouble to record the size of the trees they mentioned, as he does in "The Adirondacs"

Our patron pine was fifteen feet in girth,

The maple eight, beneath its shapely tower.

Nor is there to be found in all the good natured abuse showered upon the systematists by physiologists, ecologists and plant breeders during the last ten years anything more caustic, than Emerson's comment in "Blight"

But these young scholars, who invade our hills,

Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,
And all their botany is Latin names.

In Longfellow's poems there are to be found, of course, fine lines which express realization of the beauty of field and forest, and there is evidence of some botanical knowledge. No careful reader of his poetry will, however, maintain that Longfellow appreciated plants or plant life as he did the ocean, or even inland bodies of water. Some explanation of this may perhaps be found in the surroundings of his youth. Born within sight of the sea and his boyhood spent in a seaport town, it is natural that the ocean should have left an impression on his mind unequaled by other natural objects. Indeed in "My Lost Youth" the first five stanzas deal chiefly with the sea and the harbor including:

I remember the black wharves and the slips,

And the sea-tides tossing free;

And the Spanish sailors with bearded lips,

And the beauty and mystery of the ships,
And the magic of the sea.

Whereas the only references to things botanical are to the trees that

"1810 November eighteenth 1885
Asa Gray

in token of the universal esteem of American botanists"

was presented to Professor Gray accompanied by the lines quoted above and by greetings from 180 American botanists. See Jordan, David Starr, Leading American Men of Science. New York. 1910. Asa Gray, Botanist; by John M. Coulter, p. 211-231.

line the streets, and to Deering's Woods, a grove in the outskirts of Portland.

Whittier, most of whose early life was spent on a farm, knew the names of a good many plants, but even when he mentions them it is usually in their relation to human life or as symbolic of human activity. On receiving a sprig of heather in blossom, he writes a poem for "Burns" and in writing of "The Sycamores" his thoughts are very little with the trees but chiefly of the Irishman, Hugh Tallant, who planted them. The trailing arbutus moves him to two poems; but one "The Mayflowers," deals chiefly with the Pilgrims, and a shorter one "The Trailing Arbutus" ends thus

As, pausing, o'er the lonely flower I bent,

I thought of lives thus lowly, clogged and pent,
Which yet find room,

Through care and cumber, coldness and decay,
To lend a sweetness to the ungenial day,

And make the sad earth happier for their bloom.

It is the labor of the farm, rather than the wild life of the farm, that appeals to Whittier (see his "Songs of Labor"); and one is led to the belief that a very real interest in the man who works with his hands, as well as his creed as a Friend, inspired him in his long fight against slavery.

Even as a boy, however, Whittier apparently showed no special interest in plants. In fact, it would seem that such biological inclinations as he possessed were zoological rather than botanical. If one examines "The Barefoot Boy's" stock of nature lore

Knowledge never learned of schools,

Of the wild bee's morning chase,
Of the wild-flower's time and place,
Flight of fowl and habitude

Of the tenants of the wood;

How the tortoise bears his shell,
How the woodchuck digs his cell,

And the ground-mole sinks his well;
How the robin feeds her young,
How the oriole's nest is hung;
Where the whitest lilies blow,

Where the freshest berries grow,

Where the groundnut trails its vine,

Where the wood-grape's clusters shine;

Of the black wasp's cunning way,
Mason of his walls of clay,
And the architectural plans
Of gray hornet artisans !—

he will come to the conclusion that this particular boy was much more interested in animals than in plants. For against a very creditable list of items of information regarding quadrupeds, birds, and insects are balanced only one generalization about flowers, and three plants regarded as sources of food. Indeed, for a poet, and a life long member of the Society of Friends, Whittier betrays an almost surprising