PERENNITY OF COMPLEX INDIVIDUALS. 33! 



almost unlimited duration of life are known to 

 botanists. Such, for instance, are plants with a 

 definite rhizome, such as colchicum. Autumnal 

 colchicum has a subterranean root, the bulb of 

 which pushes out every year fresh axes for a new 

 bloom ; and as each of these new axes stretches out 

 an almost constant length, a botanist once set himself 

 the singular problem of discovering how long it would 

 take such a foot, if suitably directed, to travel round 

 the world. 



Vegetables Reproduced by Cuttings. Vegetables re- 

 produced by slips furnish another example of living 

 beings of indefinite duration. The weeping willows 

 which adorn the banks of sheets of water in the parks 

 and gardens throughout the whole of Europe have 

 sprung, directly or indirectly, from slips of the first 

 Salix Babylonica introduced to the West May it not 

 be said that they are the permanent fragments of that 

 one and the same willow ? 



Animal Colonies. These examples, as well as those 

 furnished to zoologists by the consideration of the 

 polypi which have produced by their slow growth the 

 reefs, or atolls, of the Polynesian seas, do not, how- 

 ever, prove the perennity of living beings. The 

 argument is valueless, for it is founded upon a con- 

 fusion. It turns on the difficulty that biologists 

 experience in defining the individual. The oak and 

 the polypus are not simple individuals, but associa- 

 tions of individuals, or, to use Hegel's expression, 

 the nations of which we see the successive genera- 

 tions. We give to this succession of generations a 

 unique existence, and our reasoning comes to this, 

 that we confer on each present citizen of this social 

 body the antiquity which belongs to the whole. 



