All aspects of vegetative and reproductive organs may contribute toward a determination of species, but the importance of each character is often relative, being conclusive with one group of species, useless with another. Characters considered by earlier authors to be invariable with species, such as the dimensions of leaf or cone, the number of leaves in the fascicle, the position of the resin-ducts, the presence of pruinose branchlets, etc., prove to be inconstant in some species. In fact, as the botanical horizon enlarges, the varietal limits of the species broaden and many restrictions imposed by earlier systems are gradually disappearing.
Variation is the preliminary step toward the creation of species, which come into being with the elimination of intermediate forms. Variation in a species may be the result of its participation in the evolutionary processes culminating in the serotinous Pines, or it may result from the ability of the species to adapt itself to various environments by sympathetic modifications of growth, or it may arise from some peculiarity of the individual tree.
Evolutionary variation is associated with the gradual appearance of the persistent, the oblique and the serotinous cone, and of the multinodal spring-shoot. For these conditions appear in less or greater prevalence among the species of the genus.
Variation induced by environment finds familiar illustrations among the species that can survive at the limits of vegetation and can meet these inhospitable conditions by a radical change of all growing parts. Such variations are mainly of dimensions, but, with some species, the number of fascicle-leaves is affected and the shorter growing-season may modify the cone-tissues. In Mexico and Central America are found extremes of climate within small areas and easily within the range of dissemination from a single tree. The cause of the bewildering host of varietal forms, connecting widely contrasted extremes, seems to lie in the facile adaptability of those Pines, which are able to spread from the tropical base of a mountain to a less or greater distance toward its snow-capped summit.
The peculiarities of individual trees that induce abnormally short or long growths, the dwarf or other monstrous forms, the variegations in leaf-coloring, etc., etc., are not available for classification, for they may appear in any species, in fact in any genus of Conifers. These variations are artificially multiplied for commercial and decorative purposes. But inasmuch as they are repeated in all species and genera of the Coniferae that have been long under the observation of skillful gardeners, their significance has a broader scope than that imposed by the study of a single genus.