ch bud by a like spirit-in the
community of soul, in "the voice of the Lord which maketh men to be
of one mind in an house"-"to dwell together in unity"-to take what are
practically identical views of things, and express themselves in concert
under all circumstances. Provided this-the true unifier of organism-can
be shown to exist, the absence of gross outward and visible but
inanimate common skeleton is no bar to oneness of personality.

Let us picture to our minds a tree of which all the woody fibre [sic]
shall be invisible, the buds and leaves seeming to stand in mid-air
unsupported and unconnected with one another, so that there is nothing
but a certain tree-like collocation of foliage to suggest any common
principle of growth uniting the leaves.

Three or four leaves of different ages stand living together at the
place in the air where the end of each bough should be; of these the
youngest are still tender and in the bud, while the older ones are
turning yellow and on the point of falling. Between these leaves a sort
of twig-like growth can be detected if they are looked at in certain
lights, but it is hard to see, except perhaps when a bud is on the point
of coming out. Then there does appear to be a connection which might be
called branch-like.

The separate tufts are very different from one another, so that oak
leaves, ash leaves, horse-chestnut leaves, etc., are each represented,
but there is one species only at the end of each bough.

Though the trunk and all the inner boughs and leaves have disappeared,
yet there hang here and there fossil leaves, also in mid-air; they
appear to have been petrified, without method or selection, by what we
call the caprices of nature; they hang in the path which the boughs and
twigs would have taken, and they seem to indicate that if the tree could
have been seen a million years earlier, before it had grown near its
present size, the leaves standing at the end of each bough would have
been found very different from what they are now. Let us suppose that
all the leaves at the end of all the invisible boughs, no matter how
different they now are from one another, were found in earliest budhood
to be absolutely indistinguishable, and afterwards to develop towards
each differentiation through stages which were indicated by the fossil
leaves. Lastly, let us suppose that though the boughs which seem wanted
to connect all the living forms of leaves with the fossil leaves, and
wit