from the moment of birth, while with the parasite both parents and
offspring were kept together.

"The result of this little fragment of work _was to send two genera and
fourteen species to the cemetery_--you may call it Mt. Synonym Cemetery,
if you choose--while the insect involved is now _Aphidius testaceipes_.
The systematist who studies only dried corpses will soon be out of
date."[22]

[Footnote 22: F.M. Webster, of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, in
_Science_, April 12, 1912, p. 565.]


IV

Now all this is not given to intimate that there is no scientific
justification for the term "species," but to make plain to my
non-professional readers what every well-informed biologist already
knows, namely, that at the present time the "species question" is still
in a very unsatisfactory state. The facts given above would strongly
suggest that there probably is indeed such a thing as a species, in the
sense assigned by Linnæus, who as we have seen wished to make it a
designation covering all the descendants of each distinct kind
originally created. But this original aim of Linnæus is to-day not
merely ignored but treated with lofty contempt; for according to the
prevailing theories of evolution, all the manifold diversities of life
in our modern world have come about gradually as the result of a slow
development by natural process, and hence it would be vain beyond
measure to attempt to determine the limits of a "species" in the sense
understood by Linnæus.