384 Miscellaneous. 



the mass of them, are so unlike that the difficulty of the ordinary 

 observer would be to find points of comparison. Without entering 

 into details, which would fill an article, we may safely say that the 

 difficulty with the naturalist is all the other way — that all these 

 broad differences vanish one by one as we approach the lower con- 

 fines of the two kingdoms, and that no absolute distinction whatever 

 is now known between them. It is quite possible that the same 

 organism may be both vegetable and animal, or may be first the one 

 and then the other. If some organisms may be said to be at first 

 vegetables and then animals, others, like the spores and other repro- 

 ductive bodies of many of the lower Algae, may equally claim to have 

 first a characteristically animal and then an unequivocally vegetable 

 existence* Nor is the gradation purely restricted to these simple 

 organisms. It appears in general functions, as in that of reproduc- 

 tion, which is reducible to the same formula in both kingdoms, while 

 it exhibits close approximations in the lower forms ; also in a com- 

 mon or similar ground of sensibility in the lowest forms of both, a 

 common faculty of effecting movements tending to a determinate end, 

 traces of which pervade the vegetable kingdom ; while, on the other 

 hand, this indefinable principle, this vegetable animula vagula, 

 blandula, graduates into the higher sensitiveness of the lower class 

 of animals. Nor need we hesitate to recognize the fine gradations 

 from simple sensitiveness and volition to the higher instinctive and 

 other physical manifestations of the higher brute animals. The 

 gradation is undoubted, however we may explain it. Again, propa- 

 gation is of one mode in the higher animals, of two in all plants ; 

 but vegetative propagation, by budding or offshoots, extends through 

 the lower grades of animals. In both kingdoms there may be 

 separation of the offshoots, or indifference in this respect, or con- 

 tinued and organic union with the parent stock ; and this either with 

 essential independence of the offshoots, or with a subordination of 

 these to a common whole, or finally with such subordination and 

 amalgamation, along with specialization of function, that the same 

 parts, which in other cases can be regarded only as progeny, in these 

 become only members of an individual. 



This leads to the question of individuality — a subject quite too 

 large and too recondite for present discussion. The conclusion of 

 the whole matter, however, is that individuality — that very ground 

 of being as distinguished from thing — is not attained in Nature at one 

 leap. If anywhere truly exemplified in plants, it is only in the lowest 

 and simplest, where the being is a structural unit, a single cell, 

 memberless and organless, though organic — the same thing as those 

 cells of which all the more complex plants are built up, and with 

 which every plant and (structurally) every animal began its develop- 

 ment. In the ascending gradation of the vegetable kingdom, indi- 

 viduality is, so to say, striven after, but never attained ; in the lower 

 animals it is striven after with greater though incomplete success ; it 

 is realized only in animals of so high a rank that vegetative multipli- 

 cation or offshoots are out of the question, where all parts are strictly 



