DE VRIES, HUGO. - Dutch botanist and biologist, b. at Haarlem on 16 Feb. 1848, d. at Lunteren on 20 May 1935; he was professor of botany at Amsterdam from 1878 to 1918. Two periods stand out in his scientific activity: the first (1877-88) concerns above all cellular physiology, the second (1889-1918) the origin of living plant forms through "mutation."

Conceptually, De Vries's work as a theorist of evolutionism grafts itself onto Darwinism. Darwin had seen in the varieties of species the beginnings of new species; De Vries starts from the observation that, in horticulture, varieties arise suddenly, in a single season, without gradual transitions, and without the need for long spans of time.

He found in Oenothera Lamarckiana a plant that in nature displays rapid variations of characters and that, when cultivated, lends itself to the experimental study of these mutations, which give rise to good races that he called elementary species, absolutely constant from the outset. These would coincide with pure lines. The mutationist theory (1901-1906), having met with Mendelism and with genetics, represented a notable phase in the history of biology, and for a moment offered the hope of creating new species rationally and experimentally, of finally bringing evolutionism into inductive, experimental science. But when doubts began to arise that the plant carefully chosen for study by De Vries, the Oenothera, was a hybrid, and that the new forms to which it gives rise were in reality the original species, mutationism in its primitive sense lost much of its fascination (cf. Lotsy).

Moreover, like all partial and interpretive hypotheses, which in turn in the history of biology take their place in constituting the more general hypothesis of evolution, mutationism too has been judged in opposite ways by the theorists of the various schools. F. Le Dantec saw in it a tendency toward anti-transformism and denounced it as a factor in the crisis of transformism. Others see in random mutations as a factor of evolution the triumph of chance and of the atheological, that is, of the true and profound motives of classical evolutionism. Today by mutation is meant a hereditary variation. But whether a new species has ever arisen by mutation is still a matter of discussion. What is certain is that no new organs originate by mutation.

Bibliography6 works

BIBL.: Works: Intracellulare pangenesi, Jena 1889; Die Mutationstheorie, Versuche und Beobachtungen über die Entstehung der Arten im Pflanzenreich, Leipzig 1901-1903, Italian trans. (Specia e varietà), Palermo 1908; L'évolution des êtres organisés par sauts brusques, in Scientia, 19 (1916), p. 28. Studies: on De Vries's work as a cellular physiologist: L. Jost, Vorlesungen über Pflanzenphysiologie, Jena 1913, p. 19 ff.; for the critique of mutationism: F. Le Dantec, La crise du transformisme, Paris 1909; J. P. Lotsy, Evolution im Lichte der Bastardierung betrachtet, in Genetica, 7 (1926); Necrologia di D. V., by R. Ruggles Gates, in Nature, 136 (1935), pp. 133-34. On the vicissitudes of the mutationist theory: J. Rostand, L'évolution des espèces, Paris 1946, p. 159 ff.

Luigi Scremin

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De Vries, Hugo

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