EVIDENCE FROM COLONIAL OR COMPOUND ANIMALS. 301 



strength and excellence, so in the life biological, there is the same 

 tendency to development of individual faculties and powers over the 

 common interests, and the same conversion of the colonial organisa- 

 tion into the concentrated structure and functions of the individual 

 organism. In the plant-world there is a similar tendency towards 

 concentration as the concomitant of higher life. The colonial nature 

 of many of the lowest plants (e.g. Volvox\ which consist of aggregated 

 masses of protoplasm, is undoubted. But in the highest plant-life 

 also (Fig. 197, i), the colonial nature is far more strongly marked 

 than in many animals of by no means the highest grade. Where 

 the leaf-type (e e) repeats itself indefinitely, where bud resembles bud, 

 where there is witnessed 

 the gradual transforma- 

 tion of leaf-type into 

 flower-type (//), and of 

 flower into the full fru- 

 ition of plant-life, there 

 is presented to our men- 

 tal view an exact picture 

 of the budding zoophyte 

 (Fig. 197, 2), with its 

 series of similar units (ee). 

 Here and there these 

 units become modified, 

 now for this function, now 

 for that ; but exhibiting 

 the closest parallelism with the plant, in that its reproductive bodies 

 (/) are but modifications of the ordinary members of the colony ; 

 as the flower, in turn, is but the last term in the modification 

 of the leaf. Thus, as Asa Gray well puts it, " In the as- 

 cending gradation of the vegetable kingdom, individuality is, so 

 to say, striven after, but never obtained ; in the lower animals, 

 it is striven after with greater though incomplete success ; it is 

 realised only in animals of so high a rank that vegetative mul- 

 tiplication or offshoots are out of the question where all parts 

 are strictly members and nothing else, and all subordinated to 

 a common nervous centre ; it is fully realised only in a conscious 

 person." 



Yet, whilst the plant-world has not as a whole advanced towards 

 the higher phases of individuality, we may discern here and there 

 within its limits, signs of that universal progress which evolution 

 postulates and which biological research reveals. Here and there we 

 witness among plants a progression from the prevailing colonial 

 organisation towards singleness of type. The Composite race of 

 plants derive their flame from the fact that each flower of the order 



FIG. 200. SECTION OF DAISY. 



