L. H. Bailey

The state and the farmer

Mr. Geertz examines the nature of the prevailing socioeconomic malaise in Indonesia by outlining some of its causes. He traces the main processes of change in Indonesian agriculture and rural economics in order to clarify certain basic problems that confront the new state as it moves toward modernity. His approach to the problem of economic stagnation is unusual because it attempts to integrate historical, geographic, economic, and anthropological modes of analysis into a single theoretical framework.

The Philosophy of Species-Making

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Whence came the Cultivated Strawberry

i. THE SPECIES-CONCEPTION.-It is probable that the forms of life have sprung from one common or original point. At all events, there seems to be a general series of convergent histories in organic nature, when one attempts to trace genealogies. These multitudes of forms seem to bear some definite and intimate relation to the circumstances under which they live and grow; in fact, they appear to have resulted from the splitting up and modification of the original plasma by means of the contest of numbers and the changes and diversifications in the physical characters of the earth. There are as many forms or kinds of life as there are diverse and disputed places upon the earth, and the forms no doubt are still, for the most part, slowly adjusting themselves to the continuing changes in the conditions in which they grow. We now have the best of reasons for believing that the organic creation is a plastic one, and that it will continue to be modified so long as it is possible for life to exist upon the globe. If the forms of life shall finally perish, the extinction will be preceded by a long process of diminution of virility coming as an adjustment to increasingly untoward conditions. When men first began the serious study of the forms of life, they were still convinced that the creation is a congeries of objects which had come directly from the hand of the Creator, a collection or a patchwork of most curious things. The intellectual grasp of the creation was not yet comprehensive enough to suggest, to many minds at least, that the universe is one thing, one conception, a unity in method; the mind therefore rested upon the individual objects and logically exalted them into the sphere of units in the creation. In other words, the ultimate units, the entities, in organic nature were, to the early

Variation After Birth

The strawberry has been extensively cultivated only during the last century, and the earliestattempt at methodical amnelioration extends back little more than two hundred years. The first horticultural variety of which we have any account is the Fressant, which dates from 1660. The wild species of strawberries are few, not numbering more than a dozen under the most liberal estimate, and they are well represented in the great herbaria or botanical centers of the world. Only a part of the wild types have been impressed into cultivation, and exact or very approximates dates can be given for the introduction of these cultivated species. The strawberry, therefore, is a modern fruit, and its history and evolution would seem to possess no difficulties; and yet, despite all these facts, the botanical origin of the cultivated varieties is unknown, and we have the anomaly of a common fruit, appearing within little more than a century, which the botanist does not refer to any species. Here, then, is a most remarkable instance of the evolution of a new type of plant, taking place under our very eyes: whilst the botanists have written precise histories of its successive progresses, the reasons and methods of its development have escaped them. Perhaps there is no other plant which has so quickly obscured its own

Manual of Cultivated Plants.

account of their greater usefulness and superior adaptability, ultimately interfere with the development of the less useful ancestral stages and thus tend to replace then. The necessary corollary of this process would be tachygenesis or earlier appearrance of the ancestral stages in direct proportion to the number of new characteristics successively introduced into the direct line of modification during the evolution of a group. If this be true, it can hardly be assumed that the loss of characteristics and parts taking place in this way is directly due to growth force. If growth has anything to do with these phenomenal it must act indirectly, and, as in the repetition of other similarities and parallelisms, under the controlling guiddance of heredity.