The Fern Bulletin/v09/A changed conception of species
 LUCIEN MARCUS UNDERWOOD | ||
| THE FERN BULLETIN | ||
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| Vol. IX. | JULY 1901 | No. 3. |
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| A CHANGED CONCEPTION OF SPECIES. | ||
| By Lucien M. Underwood | ||
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TWO pernicious principles early invaded the study of botany in this country and some traces of the spirit they engendered still persist in conservative settlements along with other provincialisms strikingly un-American. These were: (1) The habit of regarding as many American species as possible identical with European congeners; this was natural since the study of botany commenced in Europe rather than in America; and (2) the more or less blind acceptance of European writers on American plants as “authorities;” this has been largely due to ignorance of the paucity of American material for study in the hands of these writers. Combined with these has been the strong tendency to include a wide range of variations under a single specific description, or, to quote the favorite expression of the veteran English fern student, to treat “species in their broad sense.” Study in recent years and, particularly, close examination of the meager facilities for rational judgment on which some of these European “authorities” have based their conclusions have led to the abandonment of many positions formerly held. We are also discovering that many American and European plants formerly supposed to belong to the same species are really distinct. This is all the more apparent when we can add to herbarium and historical study, the actual observation of plants afield in both countries.
The broad idea of species is rapidly passing away with the more exact study of a wide range of material. Even in conservative New England, where Asa Gray knew only a single Antennaria, seven or more species are now recognized even among his own successors in the herbarium at Cambridge, while the blue violets, panicums, and hawthorns have successively expanded to bounds that would cause the botanists of twenty years ago to suffer acute paralysis. An example of the recent expansion of a species “in the broad sense” that will be of interest to fern students is the group formerly known under the collective name of Selaginella rupestris. After seeing the Southern Californian and Floridan development of this plant I was convinced, as field study alone can thoroughly convince one, that S. rupestris was a composite species, a conclusion readily reached after the accumulation of a wide range of variations in herbarium specimens. A preliminary study* of the material at hand resulted in the publication of several species with suggestions of more of which available material was too scanty.
*Bulletin Torrey Botanical Club, 25: 225-133. 1898.
Dr. Rydberg added another species from his field study in Montana, and Mr. Eaton still another, which, however, proved to be a re-description of an older one of Nuttall — a suggestion that, in addition to careful field study, it is necessary also to see the types of other people. It may be over-cautiousness, but unless a growing plant has been seen, I hesitate to describe it as new without an abundance of material, or unless its characters are so striking as to permit of no question. Others have not the same caution, for Dr. Hieronymus of Berlin, probably the best informed German fern student of the day, has recently made a study of S. rupestris from the whole world, in which he separates twenty-six additional species! Of these, ten are from the United States, besides S. Fendleri; which he raises to specific rank from my proposed variety. And to my knowledge there is less American material bearing on the subject in the Royal Museum in Berlin than there is in my own herbarium or in anyone of at least three public American herbaria.
As this publication† is not accessible to the greater number of our fern students, it will not be out of place to summarize the work of Dr. Hieronymus as far as our own species are concerned, especially since Mr. Maxon has omitted them from his list.
His species are:
1. S. Schmidtii, Unalaska, and var. Krauseorum, Alaska;
2. S. Montanensis, Montana;
3. S. Engelmanni, Colorado (Empire City);
4. S. Bourgeauii, Oregon;
5. S. Haydenz, Oregon, Nebraska;
6. S. Wallacei, “Oregon,” but probably collected within the limits of what is now Washington;
7. S. Wrightii, New Mexico;
8. S. Bolanderi, California (Auburn);
9. S. Hanseni, California (Amador, Calaveras, Alameda, and Fresno counties);
10. S. Sartorii, var. Oregonensis, “Oregon,” but probably collected within the limits of what is now Washington.
†Hedwigia, 39: 399-330. 1900.
Some of the above species are surely well founded, and it is quite as probable that some of them cover species already described. At any rate there ought to be careful study and collection of the plants of this genus in the field by fern students who reside or travel from the Rocky Mountain region westward. The remaining sixteen species recognized by Dr. Hieronymus are widely distributed in Asia, Africa, Mexico, and South America, and all were included in Mr. Baker's conception of Selaginella rupestris, for the Kew collection is more comprehensive than the one at Berlin.
Another line of difference of opinion is forcibly suggested by Mr. Davenport in the April Bulletin. To a stranger, it would appear from his article that he had seen the only European Botrychium matricariæfolium that American eyes had rested upon, and that my own conclusions were the result of rash youthful impulse based on “mere geographical differences” alone. While I have great respect for Mr. Davenport's critical judgment, he will doubtless admit that something depends on a study of a wide range of material, and in respect to opportunities for seeing these species in field and herbarium, others have been more favored than himself.
I first met the plant in question in 1876 where a large quantity of it grew in a maple grove some five miles north of the village of Herkimer, New York, in close proximity to a similar quantity of Botrychium lanceolatum. Boy though I was, I saw clearly that there were two things (i,e. two species), for I had abundance of material at hand — the one plant just maturing, the other just past its season of spore production — and sent some specimens to Dr. Gray at Cambridge, the great “authority” then in all things botanical, and the reply came back that both were “mere forms of B. lanceolatum.”‡ I knew better; even a child could have seen that they were different things; every fern student knows them to be distinct now; even Mr. Davenport, with all his conservative views, does not doubt them to be distinct species, although they are no more so than some others he does doubt. Let us hope that the world will still move when both Mr. Davenport and myself have likewise passed over to the silent majority.
‡ At my last visit to the Gray Herbarium in 1899 these specimens were still glued side by side on the same sheet — a silent witness to the fact that there is much sham in the “authority” idea.
Other abundant opportunities for field study were offered later in Fenner, New York, where the plants both grow in a low cedar swamp; and at a still later period in Baldwinsville, New York, where B. neglectum grows in great profusion, and where I was able to study it, in the company of the veteran fern student of Central New York, Rev. W. M. Beauchamp, companion of many a delightful tramp.
As to the so-called B. matricariæfolium of Europe (Mr. Davenport fails to notice the fact that the highest European "authorities" have abandoned this name for an earlier, shorter, and fortunately more appropriate one), I have for years been familiar with it in the herbarium, with the growing conviction that it was a different plant from ours. I have seen abundant representatives of this plant in public and private herbaria in England, Germany and France, and in 1898 I had the pleasure of seeing it growing on its native heath on Schneekopf in Thüringen, when my convictions became conclusions — the plants were surely different. It may yet be possible that B. neglectum Wood, is also a member of the European flora (one or two of Milde's later figures suggest this and there is other evidence); this would not be strange, for both B. simplex and B. Virginianum, once thought to be exclusively American, have been found in Europe.
But that the American plant is not the ordinary European species which the “authorities” have called B. matricariæfolium is to me as certain as was my earlier conclusion that our plant was distinct from B. lanceolatum. The ordinray European plant is much more closely allied to Mr. Coville's B. pumicola so beautifully figured in a recent number of the Bulletin of the Torrey Club. Habit and structure, therefore, in addition to geography, combine to separate the American plant. Still after twenty-five years of study afield and in the best herbaria of two continents, Mr. Davenport regards me “rash,” which is only a synonym of “hasty;” and without having seen the European plant in life, without having seen very much material now deposited beyond the ten-mile limit from the gilded dome of the Boston State House, he has only to send to Mr. Greenman, at Berlin, for a few specimens with which to support his previously established conclusions. Having seen the scraps of American material in so many cases besides the present one, on which European botanists have sagely based their conclusions, their right to be placed on a pedestal as “authorities” for Americans to bow down to worship has suffered in some cases a total collapse. In any case, why stop with Luerssen? Why not go back to Milde's beautiful figures of B. matricariæfolium? Can it be possible that my critic has not seen them?
In conclusion it is a pleasure to note the fact that Alphonso Wood is thus tardily recognized by a New Englander as a “good botanist” — a condition strangely in contrast with the treatment he received throughout his life from his contemporaries in the same region. It gives some of the rest of us reason to hope that even in things botanical “after death comes the judgment.”
Columbia University, May, 1901.