Dr. A . Braun on the Vegetable Individual. 349 



gradually dwindling down till it forms the tail, so the perfect 

 shoot has a second extremity opposite to that which terminates 

 with the most perfect structure (the fruit), and dwindling down 

 to an indeterminate end, the root, by means of a punctum vege^ 

 /a^foms turned downward*. , ,,,;,.i;i, 



But it will be objected : is not the ''vegetable shoot indefinitely 

 divisible ; can we not cut it up into an arbitrary number of pieces, 

 each of which is capable of reproducing the whole plant in its 

 turn ? Were this the case, the phsenomenon would not be with- 

 out its parallel among the lower animals. But this is not the 

 case. The supposed divisibility of the vegetable shoot, at least 

 in perfect plants (the Phanerogamia), to which I am now alluding, 

 is a delusion, which rests simply upon the fact that the form- 

 ation of new shoots has been confounded with a reproduction 

 of the shoot as such. As the injured shoot has the faculty of 

 producing new shoots, so the parts of the divided shoot have 

 also this faculty in many cases ; but this is no recompletion of 

 the shoot itself ; the fragment of the old shoot can continue to 

 develope in one single case only — when, in fact, it bears the apex 

 of the axis with the point of vegetation. Let us examine this case 

 more closely. If a shoot is divided transversely, under certain 

 circumstances the upper part, on which the punctum vegetationis 

 (" the heart '') is still remaining, may continue the development ; 

 but the lower part is nothing but a stump, and continues to be 

 a stump which can never complete itself by a terminal shoot, 

 and which never fails to die if it is not nourished by lateral 

 sprouts formed before, or sometimes after, the division took 

 place, and thus kept alive by its posterity. This cannot be 

 called divisibility, in the usual meaning of the term ; the whole 

 phsenomenon, on the contrary, strongly reminds us of the capa- 

 city animals possess of losing the less essential caudal extremity 



* Aristotle, on the contrary, considered that the root, being the imbibing 

 organ, was the part of the plant which corresponds to the upper part, to 

 the head and mouth of the animal ; and he regarded the stem as the infe- 

 rior part. He found the cause of this topsy-turvy position of plants in the 

 necessity under which they labour of drawing their nourishment from the 

 earth, as they are incapable of moving from place to place. In this respect 

 he compares plants to mussels {oarpaKodepfia), which also have their heads 

 turned downwards. Cf. Wimmer, Phyt. Arist. Frag. 56-65. This compa- 

 rison of the root \^ ith the animal's head is however, morphologically speak- 

 ing, inverted ; for as the highest stratum of the spinal cord (the sensorial 

 portion) attains its maximum state of development in the head of animals, 

 it can only be compared to that CxXtremity of the plant's axis in which the 

 highest and noblest part of the plant is exhibited. Besides, the peculiar 

 and striking characteristic of the animal's head, its involved structure ter- 

 minating the organism, is by no means to be found in the root end of the 

 plant ; but it is seen in the oj)posite end which terminates with flower a»d 

 fruit. 



