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from the part of the plant where it was brought forth. The 

 stem of the rose might have been incrusted with a chain 

 of such connected larvae as we see the stem of a fucus in- 

 crusted with a chain of connected polypes, and only the 

 last developed winged males and oviparous females might 

 have been set free. The connecting medium might even 

 have permitted a common current of nutriment contributed 

 to by each individual to circulate through the whole com- 

 pound body. But how little of anything essential to the 

 animal would be affected by cutting through this hypo- 

 thetical connecting and vascular integument and setting 

 each individual free ! If we perform this operation on the 

 compound zoophyte, the detached polype may live and 

 continue its gemmiparous reproduction. This is more cer- 

 tainly and constantly the result in detaching one of the 

 monadiform individuals which assists in composing the 

 seeming individual whole called ( Volvox globator ' ; and so 

 likewise with the leaf-bud. And this liberation Nature has 

 actually performed for us in the case of the Aphis, and 

 she thereby plainly teaches us the true value or significa- 

 tion in morphology of the connecting links that remain to 

 attach together the different gemmiparous individuals of 

 the volvox, the zoophyte, and the plant. 



The popular notion of a plant, as we have said, is that 

 it is one individual complex organism, of which the root 

 answers to the nutrient system, the trunk and branches to 

 the skeleton, the leaves to the lungs, and the flowers to 

 the generative organs of an animal : but we never see the 

 stomach converted into a lung, the lungs converted into a 

 testis or ovarium, or reciprocally, as we trace the leaf 

 changed into the stamen, or this by retrograde metamor- 

 phosis brought back to the state of a leaf. The stomach 

 of a man if detached would not live and reproduce its kind 

 like the polype of the Sertularia or the monad of the Vol- 

 vox ; nor would the lung manifest its individuality like the 

 leaf of the Bryophyllum under similar circumstances. No ! 



