191

6

The Species

Problem Arises

OTHER DARWINIANS: LANKESTER, ROMANES,

HUXLEY, POULTON, KARL JORDAN

At least one of Darwin’s most prominent followers, E. Ray Lankester, exceeded
Darwin’s published suggestion that the term “species” was arbitrary. Poulton said
that Lankester was

... inclined to think that we should discard the word species not merely momentarily

but altogether.^1

Ernst Haeckel concurred, stating in his The Evolution of Man that

Endless disputes arose among the “pure systematizers” on the empty question, whether

the form called a species was “a good or bad species, a species or a variety, a sub-species

or a group,” without the question being even put as to what these terms really contained

and comprised. If they had earnestly endeavoured to gain a clear conception of the terms,

they would long ago have perceived that they have no absolute meaning, but are merely

stages in the classication, or systematic categories, and of relative importance only.^2

T. H. Huxley, who had disagreed in correspondence with Darwin over saltative
evolution, likewise wrote of species that

[a]nimals and plants are divided into groups, which become gradually smaller, begin-

ning with a K, which is divided into S-K; then come the smaller

divisions called P; and so on from a P to a C, from a C to

an O, from O to F, and from these to G, until at length we

come to the smallest groups of animals which can be dened one from the other by

constant characters, which are not sexual; and these are what naturalists call S

in practice, whatever they may do in theory.

If in a state of nature you nd any two groups of living beings, which are sepa-

rated one from the other by some constantly-recurring characteristic, I don’t care how

slight or trivial, so long as it is dened and constant, and does not depend on sexual

(^1) Poulton 1908, 62. Lankester writes of Agassiz’s objectivity of species, that he wrote at the moment
Darwin published the Origin
(^) ... by which universal opinion has been brought to the position that species, as well as genera,
orders and classes, are the subjective expressions of a vast ramifying pedigree in which the only
objective existence are individuals ... [Lankester 1890, 319]
(^2) 1874, third edition cited [Haeckel 1896, vol. 1, 115].