almost unlimited duration of life are known to botanists. Such, for instance, are plants with a definite rhizome, such as colchicum. Autumnal colchicum has a subterranean root, the bulb of which pushes out every year fresh axes for a new bloom; and as each of these new axes stretches out an almost constant length, a botanist once set himself the singular problem of discovering how long it would take such a foot, if suitably directed, to travel round the world.
Vegetables Reproduced by Cuttings.—Vegetables reproduced by slips furnish another example of living beings of indefinite duration. The weeping willows which adorn the banks of sheets of water in the parks and gardens throughout the whole of Europe have sprung, directly or indirectly, from slips of the first Salix Babylonica introduced to the West. May it not be said that they are the permanent fragments of that one and the same willow?
Animal Colonies.—These examples, as well as those furnished to zoologists by the consideration of the polypi which have produced by their slow growth the reefs, or atolls, of the Polynesian seas, do not, however, prove the perennity of living beings. The argument is valueless, for it is founded upon a confusion. It turns on the difficulty that biologists experience in defining the individual. The oak and the polypus are not simple individuals, but associations of individuals, or, to use Hegel's expression, the nations of which we see the successive generations. We give to this succession of generations a unique existence, and our reasoning comes to this, that we confer on each present citizen of this social body the antiquity which belongs to the whole.
