Dr. A. Braun on the Vegetable Individual. 247 



call plants, and here silently hold their dances and celebrate 

 their orgies */' 



Farther than this we cannot go : if we did, we should have to 

 leave specific vegetable life, and, instead of investigating its most 

 minute spheres of formation, the visible cells, vesicles, granules 

 or monads, turn to the invisible individua f of brute matter, so 'i 

 as to consider plants as phsenomena of appellant and repellant, ^ 

 coherent and incoherent atoms. If we must understand by an 

 individual, a being perfectly simple and indivisible, this is our - 

 last refuge, in which we may indeed reach an individual, but not - 

 a vegetable individual ; for this would then be identical with the ' 

 material individual common to all corporeal existence. But, even > 

 if we could give up all hopes of a specific vegetable individual,'* 

 doubt would still linger round these physical individuals ; for evew > 

 the existence of the universal primary particles of bodies — the ^ 

 material individuals, the atoms, — is not conclusively established, i 

 No eye has seen them ; we do not even think of considering them > 

 as objects of direct perception ; we only accept them as an hypo- 1 

 thesis, to eke out our theories of motion and of chemical affinity ; " 

 and to enable us to compute their relations. The question might 

 easily be asked, whether the same phsenomena may not be as 

 well explained by assuming the continuity, expansibility, and « 

 penetrability of matter. However this may be, the question con- 

 cerning the existence of atoms certainly lies beyond the limits of ' 

 botanical investigation; and if the existence of vegetable indi-^ 

 viduals depends on this question, the botanist must despair of j 

 proving it. Thus the question at which we have now arrived is * 

 this : can we speak of individuals in botany ? and this is identical ' 

 with another: are plants mere products of the operations of^^ 

 matter {i. e. of a substance self-moving, uniting and separating, ^ 

 by an innate force), and hence non-entities, or mere phsenomena; a 

 resulting from, or produced by, the blind forces of nature ; or ^^ 

 may we ascribe to plants an independent existence in nature/ ^ 

 notwithstanding their connexion with the external world ? /-juTyja 



If what we call plants are nothing but complex chemical and^j 

 physical joroce^se^, then we can no longer speak of their individuals^^ 

 and species in the sense the words usually bear; for the mere"^ 

 phsenomena of the operations of the primary substance, which, 

 have no other efficient principle than the forces of this sub-jj 

 stance, cannot be regarded as self-existent beings, or as peculiar ' 

 (specific) kinds of these beings, or as single (individual) modi- 

 fications of them. This is, in fact, the result towards which the 



* Mayer, Supplemente zum Lelire vom Kreislauf (1837), p. -^9. I am^T 

 acquainted with Mayer's views through Meyen's Pflanzenphys. ii. p. 25(k *^r 

 t Cicero calls the atoms "individua." ''^''' ^^^ 



