 The psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus’s famous quip that “psychology has a long past, but only a short history” (1908: 1, Die Psychologie hat eine lange Vergangenheit, doch nur eine kurze Geschichte) might well be adapted to remind us that answers to the Focal Question have a long past, one stretching back to at least the late eighteenth-century with the emergence of the life sciences. In their recent collection of essays Biological Individuality, the historians Scott Lidgard and Lynne Nyhart reviewed the literature of the past two hundred years to compile a list of twenty three criteria used to define or characterize “individual or its contained subset organism”, noting that while 