ing from syntax. Conventionally an equation for algebra ' is just a pair of terms built from variables, the constituent operations of ' , and some fixed standard operations. An equation is valid if the two terms are equal for all values of the variables. We are going to model a syntactic term as a morphism that has the values of the variables as source. For example, the two terms ` x ' and ` x join x ' (with variable x of type tree ) are modeled by morphisms id and id \Delta id ; join of type tree ! tree . So, an equation for ' is modeled by a pair of terms (T '; T 0 ') , T and T 0 being mappings of morphisms which we call `transformers'. This faces us with the following problem: what properties must we require of an arbitrary mapping T in order that it model a classical syntactic Datatype Laws without Signatures 7 term? Or, rather, what properties of classical syntactic terms are semantically essential, and how can we formalise these as properties of a transformer T ? Of course...