884 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 adsolute 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 Algze, 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 
Bilin t 
