152 INTERPOLATION OF A CONTINUOUS 



of a necklace would scatter the beads of which it is made up. 

 " The wingless larval Aphides are not very locomotive ; 

 they might have been attached to one another by continuity 

 of integument, and each have been fixed to suck the juices 

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

 stem of the rose might have been encrusted with a chain of 

 such connected larva, as we see the stem of a Fucus encrusted 

 with a chain of connected polypes, and only the last deve- 

 loped winged males and oviparous females might have been 

 set free. The connecting medium might even have per- 

 mitted a common current of nutriment, contributed to by 

 each individual, to circulate through the w^hole compound 

 body. But how little of anything essential to the animal 

 would be affected by cutting through this hypothetical con- 

 necting and vascular integument, and setting each indivi- 

 dual free. If we perform this operation on the compound 

 zoophyte, the detached polype may live and continue its 

 gemmiparous reproduction. This is more certainly and 

 constantly the result in detaching one of the monadiform 

 individuals, which assists in composing the seeming indivi- 

 dual whole called " Voltox globator ;" and so likewise with 

 the leaf-bud. And this liberation Nature has actually per- 

 formed for us in the case of the Aphis, and she thereby 

 plainly teaches the true value or signification, in morphology, 

 of the connecting links that remain to attach together the 

 different gemmiparous individuals of the Vohox, the zoo- 

 phyte, and the plant."* 



Though it may be convenient therefore, as proposed by 

 Dr. Lankester,*!" to have appropriate terms to distinguish 

 attached gemmae of all kinds from those detached from the 

 parent stock — such as isozoids and isophytoids for the 

 former, and allozooids and allophytoids for the latter — w^e 



* Prof. Owen's Partlienogenesis, p. 60. The correspondence is in- 

 geniously shown by the comparative diagrams in the Frontispiece, 

 t In a communication to the British Association, 1857. 



