s Dr. A. Braun on the Vegetablg Ji(ii4ipf^u§sf,.^y[ 



XXXTI. — The Vegetable Individual, in its relation to Species. iSy 

 Dr. Alexander Braun, Professor of Botany in the Univer- 

 sity of Berlin, &c * Translated by Chas. Francis STONBi^^ 

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As I attempted' to show in Part I., whatever 'seems arbitrary 

 and indefinite in the existing views of what constitutes the Ve- 

 getable Individual has its ground in the nature of plants them- 

 selves, which in their realization are resolved into a plurality 

 which they are not capable of reducing to as complete a unity 

 as animals are. As we ascend in the natural kingdoms, indivi- 

 duals increase in importance, until they reach their most perfect 

 independence in Man. Hence, if we would appreciate them 

 justly in the lower departments, in which their character is less 

 definite, we must try to comprehend the less perfect structures 

 by starting from the more perfect ones : to appreciate vegetable 

 individuals we must start from a comparison of animal indivi- 

 duals. From this point of view we perceive at once that the cell 

 cannot be regarded as the proper individual in plants, otherwise 

 it would have to be considered in the same manner in animals. 

 Cell-formation is a property common to plants and animals : but 

 in animals it appears far more obviously as a subordinate ele- 

 ment in the organization of the whole body, than it does in 

 plants ; since the animal cell, in most cases, is not so independ- 

 ent, nor so determinate, nor so permanently isolated as the vege- 

 table cell. For this reason, too, it is rarer to find the animal cell 

 considered as the proper animal individual, although Schwann 

 has shown that animal cells are analogous to vegetable cells, and 

 may be as justly considered individual organisms as they. Yet 

 as mere curiosa we might adduce the somewhat similar assertion 

 of Gaillon,'that " men and animals are properly masses of Infu- 

 soria ;'' and Oken^s doctrine of generation, " a synthesis of Infu- 

 soria," might, perhaps, be interpreted in the same sense. The 

 " stories ^' of the axes, the internodes with their leaves, might 

 claim to be compared with the animal individual with more jus- 

 tice than the cell, especially if leaf-formation really took place, 

 as the defenders of such doctrines have represented ; that is, if 

 every successive leaf were produced as a new structure out of the 

 old one (out of its base which becomes the internode), and if the 

 whole stem were thus merely a concatenation of leaves shooting 

 out of and growing above each other. But this is not so : the 

 rudiment of the stem as an uninterrupted growth ("conti- 



* Reprinted from Silliman's American Journal for September 1855. 



