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 reproduction, which is reducible to the same formula in both kingdoms, while it exhibits close approximations in the lower forms; also in a common 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 psychical manifestations of the higher brute animals.  The gradation is undoubted, however we may explain it.  Again, propagation 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 continued 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 development.  In the ascending gradation of the vegetable kingdom individuality 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 multiplication or offshoots are out of the question, where all parts are strictly members and nothing else, and all subordinated to a common nervous centre,—­fully realized, perhaps, only in a conscious person.