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when I was first beginning these studies, and I told a man who is now deceased,
(his name shall not, therefore, be brought before you because it isn't fair to
him, since he is dead and cannot talk back) I said, "I want to study classification
of Manihot esculenta." He said, "Your nuts, your absolutely nuts, you can't do
anything with the classification of that bunch of things, particularly a cultivated
plant." He couldn't have done a better job to set me on course by waving that kind
of flag in my face. But if you stop to think how you are going to study these groups
of plants such that you can make some sort of a reasonable classification of them,
you soon learn of the great difficulties, because the variations between plants
is so slack from one plant to the next that you have a great deal of difficulty in
recalling the total variation that one plant has in relation to the next plant, and
then by the time you have gotten through the second, third, or fourth, or fifth, or
maybe the hundredth plant, you have forgotten entirely what the content of variation
was in the first plant. So to try to make these comparisons, you are in great need
of some sort of extension of your arm in order to get into this kind of study. A
very factual problem generated some of the ideas which will be going into this
course. Along with these ideas the questions of in taxonomy itself that were
hallowed words, hallowed ideas, and so forth bugged me for a long time. It seemed
when I first got to be a student in taxonomy that the professor somehow knew what
a species was, because the professors were guys that were generating new species,
they were naming ;new species all the time, and I always wanted to know, "how in
the name of did you know that this thing was a new species, different from
anything else that is presently . But I discovered very quickly that
some of the professors were quite honest in saying, "Well, I don't know what this
new species is, and I don't know whether this thing here is a new species, all I
know is that in my study of the groups of organisms I haven't seen anything that
looks quite like it. Therefore, it is a new species." How do you grab that definition then? How could you give that to a student and expect that he is