Some Questions which they Suggest. 67 



akin to the garlic or the Butchers' broom than to the 

 crocus. 



It seems as if when two lines of development started 

 from a common point, they sometimes carried in gremio the 

 necessity of development along the same lines, and the 

 production of like form at corresponding points in the 

 divergent courses. 



THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE GENERATION. But it is time 

 to return from the long digression into which we have 

 been led by the unicellular plants. If we consider our- 

 selves or any other higher organism, whether animal or 

 vegetable, and ask what is the individual and what is the 

 generation, we feel at first quite able to reply. We know 

 that the answers to these questions, when we seek to 

 pursue the enquiry to the bottom, involve other profound 

 questions, perhaps, insoluble difficulties, but on the surface 

 the answers are easy. 



If now we turn to the myxies and ask what is the 

 individual, the answer seems attended with no small 

 difficulty. In the swarm spore stage each separate proto- 

 plast is the individual ; each is capable of separate motion, 

 of digestion, and of multiplication. If we turn to the 

 plasmodium stage, the individual appears to be the entire 

 plasmodium, built up as it has been by the union of a great 

 number of protoplasts, and not always the descendants of 

 the same parents ; if we take the sporangium stage, and 

 consider especially those cases in which each sporangium 

 stands on its own hypothallus, separated from the 

 hypothallus of its neighbours, the sporangium seems to 



F2 



