Each uniaxial plant may perhaps fairly be regarded as a distinct individual; though there are botanists who do not make even this admission. What, however, are we to say of a multiaxial plant? It is, indeed, usual to speak of a tree with its many branches and shoots as singular; but strong reasons may be urged for considering it as plural. Every one of its axes has a more or less independent life, and when cut off and planted may grow into the likeness of its parent; or, by grafting and budding, parts of this tree may be developed upon another tree, and there manifest their specific peculiarities. Shall we regard all the growing axes thus resulting from slips and grafts and buds, as parts of one individual or as distinct individuals? If a strawberry-plant sends out runners carrying buds at their ends, which strike root and grow into independent plants that separate from the original one by decay of the runners, must we not say that they possess separate individualities; and yet if we do this, are we not at a loss to say when their separate individualities were established, unless we admit that each bud was from the beginning an individual? Commenting on such perplexities Schleiden says--"Much has been written and disputed concerning the conception of the individual, without, however, elucidating the subject, principally owing to the misconception that still exists as to the origin of the conception. Now the individual is no conception, but the mere subjective comprehension of an actual object, presented to us under some given specific conception, and on this latter it alone depends whether the object is or is not an individual. Under the specific conception of the solar system, ours is an individual: in relation to the specific conception of a planetary body, it is an aggregate of many individuals." ... "I think, however, that looking at the indubitable facts already mentioned, and the relations treated of in the course of these considerations, it will appear most advantageous and most useful, in a scientific point of view, to consider the vegetable cell as the general type of the plant (simple plant of the first order). Under this conception, _Protococcus_ and other plants consisting of only one cell, and the spore and pollen-granule, will appear as individuals. Such individuals may, however, again, with a partial renunciation of their individual independence, combine under definite laws into definite forms (somewhat as the individual animals do in the globe of the _Volvox globator_[25]). These again appear empirically as individual beings, under a conception of a species (simple plants of the second order) derived from the form of the normal connexion of the elementary individuals. But we cannot stop here, since Nature herself combines these individuals, under a definite form, into larger associations, whence we draw the third conception of the plant, from a connexion, as it were, of