 Closely associated with the concept of a continuum is that of  infinitesimal.[5]  An infinitesimal magnitude has been somewhat hazily conceived as a continuum “viewed in the small”, an “ultimate part” of a continuum. In something like the same sense as a discrete entity is made up of its individual units, its “indivisibles”, so, it was maintained, a continuum is “composed” of infinitesimal magnitudes, its ultimate parts. (It is in this sense, for example, that mathematicians of the seventeenth century held that continuous curves are “composed” of infinitesimal straight lines.) Now the “coherence” of a continuum entails that each of its (connected) parts is also a continuum, and, accordingly, divisible. Since points are indivisible, it follows that no point can be part of a continuum. Infinitesimal magnitudes, as parts of continua, cannot, of necessity, be points: they are, in a word, nonpunctiform.