Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, Vol. 65
Now in most large genera we find among the component species one which in its characters Occupies the mean between the extremes shown by the other forms, and which typically covers the entire economic, physical, and geographical range of the genus, unless the species on the borders of the generic range are isolated by barriers.
Obviously this is the species best adapted to the conditions Of the present day and, if conditions Should remain indefinitely as_ they are now, such a species would gradually succeed, by the mere force of numbers and greater procreative power, which have already enabled it to overrun all the other forms, 1n exterminating all of the other species of the genus which it was able to reach.
As families and orders are constructively the same as genera, we typically find in them a highly dominant genus, subfamily, or family, which stands in the same relation to them that the dominant species does to the genus.
And among the higher groups the same thing is repeated; thus, for example, we find among the mammals the rodents, among the birds the finches, among the fishes the perches, among the ?ies the muscoid types, etc., each group including species almost all of which are of small average Size, yet never excessively small, representing the dominant types which, appear to be on the road to Supplanting all the other types through a development from their immediate stock of virile competing forms, and which, were conditions to remain in definitely as they are at the present epoch, would eventually come to form the entire world fauna.
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