specializer (speshalizer)

One who makes a specialty of anything; a specialist. Also spelled specialiser. The Nation. specially (spesh'al-i), adv. [ Thay suld be clene of euery vyce, And, special lie , of Couatyce. Lauder , Dewtie of Kyngis (E. E. T. S.), 1. 461. The earth... of Scripture generally is specially the Dawson, Nature and the Bible, p. 101. dry land. 2. For a particular reason or purpose; by special or exceptional action or proceeding: as, a meeting specially called; an officer specially designated. The Latin tongue lived on in Britain after the withdrawal of the legions, but it lived on, as it lives on in modern countries, as a book-language specially learned. E. A. Freeman , Amer. Lects., p. 124. specialty (spesh'al-ti), n.; pl. specialties (-tiz). [ And that they that be ordeynyd to sette me ys bryng them be ordre and continuelly tyl alle be serued, and not inordinatly, And thorow affeccion to personys or by spe Babees Book (E. E. T. S.), p. 330. cialte. IMG:content-1669.png:[blocks in formation] 5. A special employment or pursuit; a distinct occupation or division of duty or interest; that which one does especially, either by choice or by a ignment. As each individual selects a special mode of activity for himself, and aims at improvement in that specialty , he finds himself attaining a higher and still higher degree of aptitude for it. Uneconomical application of punishment, though proper, perhaps, as well in specie as in degree. Bentham , Introd. to Morals and Legislation, xvi. 54, note. (b) In coin. See def. 2. Hence, as an English noun-2. Coin; metallic money; a medium of exchange consisting of gold or silver (the precious metals) coined by sovereign authority in pieces of various standard weights and values, and of minor coins of copper, bronze, or some other cheap or base metal: often used attributively. The earliest coinage of specie is attributed to the Lydians, about the eighth century B. C. Previously, and long afterward in many countries, pieces of silver and gold (the latter only to a small extent) were pa ed by weight in payments, as lumps of silver are still in China. The use of specie as a measure of price is based upon the intrinsic value of the precious metals as commodities, which has diminished immensely since ancient times, but is comparatively stable for long periods under normal circumstances. In modern civilized communities specie or bullion is largely used by banks as a basis or security for circulating notes (bank-notes) representing it. In times of great financial disturbance this security sometimes becomes inadequate from depletion or through exce ive i ues of notes, and a general suspension of specie payments takes place, followed by great depreciation of the paper money. General suspensions of specie payments occurred in the United States in 1837, 1857, and 1861, the last, due to the civil war, continuing till 1879. Specie payments by British banks were suspended by law, in consequence of the French wars, from 1797 to 1823, but were actually resumed by the Bank of England in 1821. Similar interruptions of solvency have occurred in the other European countries, resulting in some in the substitution of depreciated paper money for specie in ordinary use and reckoning. - Specie circular, in U. S. hist., a circular i ued by the Secretary of the Treasury in July, 1836, by direction of President Jackson, ordering United States agents to receive in future only gold and silver or Treasury certificates in payment for government lands. species (spē'shēz), n.; pl. species. [In ME. spece, spice, species, kind, spice (see spicel ); in mod. E. directly from the L.; = F. espèce, species ( espèces, coin), = Sp. Pg. especie = It. spezie = G. Dan. Sw. species, species (D. spe cie = Dan. specie, specie), The sun, the great eye of the world, prying into the rece es of rocks and the hollowne of valleys, receives species or visible forms from these objects. Jer. Taylor , Works (ed. 1835), I. 782. place of production: as, a dealer in specialties; also, an article to which a dealer profe es to pay special attention or care, or which is alleged to po e special advantages in regard to quality, quantity, or price: as, fountain-pens a specialty. See the second quotation under speciality, 2.-7. In law, an instrument under seal, containing an expre or implied agreement for the payment of money. The word has also been loosely used to include obligations or debts upon recognizance, judgments and decrees, and statutes, because these, being matter of record, rank in solemnity, conclusivene , and endurance with free contracts under seal. Let specialties be therefore drawn between us. Shak., T. of the S., ii. 1. 127. All instruments under seal, of record, and liabilities imposed by statute, are specialties within the meaning of the Stat. 21 James I. Wood , On Limitation of Actions, § 29. specie (spē'siē or -shē), n . [L. specie , abl. of species , kind, formerly much used in the phrase in specie , in kind, in ML. in coin: see species .] 1. As a Latin noun, used in the phrase in spe cie : ( a ) In kind. So a lion is a perfect creature in himself, though it be le than that of a buffalo, or a rhinocerote. They differ sent. Wit... is no other than the faculty of imagination in the writer, which searches over all the memory for the Dryden. By putting such a rubric into its Mi al, the church of Milan sought to expre nothing more than that the accidents or species of the sacrament are broken. Rock , Church of our Fathers, i. 125. 2t. Something to be seen or looked at; a spectacle or exhibition; a show. Shows and species serve best with the people. Bacon . 3. [Tr. of Gr. εἶδος .] In logic , and hence in ordinary language, a cla included under a higher cla , or, at least, not considered as including lower cla es; a kind; a sort; a number of individuals having common characters peculiar to them. Ther is a privee spece of pride that waiteth first to be salewed er he wol sale we. Chaucer, Parson's Tale. Different e ences alone... make different species. Locke, Human Understanding, III. vi. 35. It is well for thee that we came under a convention to pardon every species of liberty which we may take with each other. Scott , Red gauntlet, letter iii. A poor preacher being the worst po ible species of a poor man. W. M. Baker, New Timothy, p. 222. 4. One of the kinds of things constituting a combined aggregate or a compound; a distinct species constituent part or element; an instrumental means: as, the species of a compound medicine. [Now rare in this medical sense, and obsolete or archaic in others.] In Algebra, Species are those Letters, Characters, Notes, or Marks which represent the Quantities in any Equation or Demonstration. E. Phillips , New World of Words (ed. 1706). 5. In biol., that which is specialized or differentiated recognizably from anything else of the same genus, family, or order; an individual which differs, or collectively those individuals which differ, specifically from all the other members of the genus, etc., and which do not differ from one another in size, shape, color, and so on, beyond the limits of (actual or a umed) individual variability, as those animals and plants which stand in the direct relation of parent and offspring, and perpetuate certain inherited characters intact or with that little modification which is due to conditions of environment. Species is thus practically, and for purposes of cla ification, the middle term between genus on the one hand and individual (or specimen ) on the other; and only the latter can be said in strictne to have material existence, so that species, like genus, etc., is in this sense an abstract conception. It is also an a ured fact in biology that no given stock or lineage breeds perfectly true in all its individuals; the line of descent is always marked by modification of characters (due to the interaction between heredity and environment); the whole tendency of such modification is toward further specialization, in the preservation of the more useful and the extinction of the le useful or the usele characters, and thus to the gradual acquirement, by insensible increments, of differences impre ed upon a plastic organism from without-which is as much as to say that new species have always been in proce of evolution, and still continue to be so developed. (See biological senses of evolution, selection, survival, and variation.) Such evolution has in fact been arrested at some point for every species once existent whose members have perished in time past; and of those specific forms whose adaptation to their environment has fitted them to survive till the present some are tending to perpetuation and some to extinction, but all are subject to ince ant modification, for better or worse. (See atavism, reversion, 2, retrograde, degra dation, 7, 8, and parasitism, 2.) Such are the view's taken by nearly all biologists of the present day, in direct opposition to the former opinion of a special creation, which proceeded upon the a umption that all species of animals and plants, such as we find them actually to be, came into existence by creative flat at some one time, and have since been perpetuated with little if any modification. In consequence of the fact that the greatest as well as the least differences in organisms are of degree and not of kind, no rigorous and unexceptionable definition of species is po ible in either the animal or the vegetable kingdom; and in the actual naming, characterizing, and cla ifying of species naturalists differ widely, some reducing to one or two species the same series of individuals which others describe as a dozen or twenty species. (See lumper, 3, splitter, 2.) This, however, is rather a nomenclatural than a doctrinal difference. The difficulty of deciding in many cases, and the impo ibility of deciding in some, what degree of difference between given specimens shall be considered specific, and so formally named in the binomial system, have led to the introduction of several terms above and below the species (see subgenus, subspecies, con species, να riety, race 3, 5 (a) (b), intergrade, v. i.), and also to a modification of the binomial nomenclature (see polynomial, 2, and trinomial ). Two tests are commonly applied to the discrimination between good species and mere subspecies or varieties: (1) the individuals of thoroughly distinct species do not interbreed, or, if they are near enough to hybridize, their progeny is usually infertile, so that the cro is not in perpetuity: the horse and a offer a good case in point; (2) the specific distinctions do not vanish by insensible degrees when large series of specimens from different geographical localities or geological horizons are available for comparison; for, should characters a umed to be distinctive, and therefore specific, be found to grade away under such scrutiny, they are by that fact proved to be non-specific, and the specimens in question are reducible to the rank of con species, subspecies, varieties, or races. Attempts which have been made to separate mankind into several species of the genus Homo fail according to both of the criteria above stated. To these may be added, in judging the validity of an alleged species, the third premise, that stable specific forms are evolved by or in the course of natural selection only; for all the countle stocks or breeds resulting from artificial selection, however methodically conducted, tend to revert when left to themselves, and also hybridize freely; they are not therefore in perpetuity except under cultivation, and are no species in a proper sense, though their actual differences may have become, under careful selec tion, far greater than those usually accounted specific or even generic. (See dog, rosel.) Taking into account geo logical succe ion in time as well as geographical distri bution in space, and proceeding upon accepted doctrines of the evolution of all forms of animal and vegetable life from antecedent forms, it is evident, first, that "species is predicable only by means of the "mi ing links" in the chains of genetic relationships; for, were all organisms that have ever existed before our eyes in their actual evolutionary sequences, we should find no gap or break in the whole series; but, secondly, that development along numberle diverging lines of descent with modification has in fact resulted (through obliteration of the consecutive steps in the proce ) in the living fauna and flora of the globe, in respect of which not only specific, but generic, ordinal, and still broader distinctions are easily and certainly predicable. It does not appear that any animal or plant has always maintained what we now find its specific character to be yet the persistence of some forms under no greater variation than that usually ac species counted generic is established, as in the case of the genus Lingula, whose members have survived from the Silurian to the present epoch with only specific modification. In the animal kingdom probably about 250,000 species have been described, recorded, and formally named by a word following the name of the genus to which they are severally ascribed (see under specific ); the actual number of species is doubtle much greater than this; some 200,000 species are insects (see Insect a ), of which 80,000 or more belong to one order (see Coleoptera ). These estimates are exclusive of merely nominal species. (See synonym.) The known species of flowering plants are summed up by Durand in his "Index Generum Phanerogamorum" as follows: dicotyledons, 78,200; monocotyledons, 19,600; gymnosperms, 2,420-in all, 100,220. This is the net result after extensive sifting. To this number large additions are to be expected from regions, as central Africa, still imperfectly or not at all explored. Of the number of cryptogams no reliable estimate can at present be given. The described species of fungi, judging from the eight volumes of Saccardo's work now published, are likely to number, before sifting, about 50,000. Abbreviated sp., with plural spp. 6t. Coin; metallic money; specie. See specie. Rome po e ed a much greater proportion of the circu lating species of its time than any European city. Arbuthnot, Ancient Coins. IMG:content-1670.png:[blocks in formation] 7. One of a cla of pharmaceutical preparations consisting of a mixture of dried herbs of analogous medicinal properties, used for making decoctions, infusions, etc. See under tea. -8. In civil law, the form or shape given to materials; fashion; form; figure. Burrill. 9. In math.: ( a ) A letter in algebra denoting a quantity. (This meaning was borrowed by some early writers from the French of Viète, who derived it from a Latin translation of Diophantus, who uses εἶδος to mean a term of a polynomial in a particular power of the un four species, below. of arithmetic See thundamentals, operation Disjunct species, in logic. See disjunct. Intelligible species. See intentional species. - Intentional species, a similitude or simulacrum of an outward thing; the vicarious object in perception and thought, according to the doctrine held and attributed to Aristotle by the medieval realists, beginning with A quinas. Such species were divided into sensible species and intelligible species, which distinction and terminology in tensible by Scotus and others. The species mediated between the outward object and the senses. They were metaphorically called emanations, but, being devoid of matter, are be confounded with the emanations of Demo crit us, from which they also differ in being related to other senses besides sight. So far as they belong to the outward thing they were called impre ed, so far as they are perceived by the mind expre ed species. From these sensible species the agent intellect, by an act of abstraction, was supposed to separate certain intelligible species, which the higher or patient intellect was able to perceive. These intelligible species so far as they belong to sense were called impre ed, so far as they are perceived by the intellect expre ed species. Species were further distinguished as acquired, infused, and connatural. The doctrine of intentional species was rejected by the nominalists, and exploded early in the seventeenth century, but not until the nineteenth was it generally acknowledged to be foreign to the opinion of Aristotle. -Nascent species, in biol., a species of animal or plant in the act, as it were, of being born or produced; an incipient species, whose characters are not yet established in the course of its development. - Sensible species. See intentional species. - Species anthelminticæ, a mixture of equal parts of absinthium, tansy, camomile, and santonica. - Species diureticæ, a mixture of equal parts of roots of lovage, asparagus, fennel, parsley, and butcher's-broom. - Species laxantes. Same as St. Germain tea (which see, under tea ). - Species pec to rales. Same as breast tea (which see, under tea ). - Species sud orifice. Same as wood tea (which see, under tea ). -Subaltern species, in logic, that which is both a species of some higher genus and a genus in respect of the species into which it is divided. The four species, the four fundamental operations of arithmetic-addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. This phrase, rare in English but common in German, seems to have been first so applied by the East Frisian mathematician Gemma in 1540. It was borrowed from logic, where since Petrus His pan us four species of logical procedure are enumerated in all the old books. Thus, Wilson (1551) says: "There be fower kindes of argumentes, a perfeicte argument, an unperfeicte argument, an induct i one, an example"; and Blundeville (1599): "There bee foure principall kindes or formes of argumentation, that is, a syllogisme, an induction, an enthymeme, and example." species-cover (spē'shēz-kuv"ėr), n. The cover used in a herbarium to inclose and protect all the species-sheets of a single species. Such covers are usually made of folded sheets of light-weight brown paper, a little larger than the species-sheets. species-cycle (spē'shēz-sī kl), n. In bot., the complete series of forms needed to represent adequately the entire life-history of a species. species-monger (spē'shēz-mung"ger), n. In nat. hist.: ( a ) One who occupies himself mainly or exclusively in naming and describing species, without inclination to study, or perhaps without ability to grasp, their significance as biological facts; a specialist in species, who cares little or nothing for broader genera liz a 5807 tions. ( b ) One who is finical in drawing up specific diagnoses, or given to distinctions without a difference. [Cant in both senses.] species-paper (spē'shēz-pā"pėr), n. Same as species-sheet.