The Organism and its Major Parts 31 



While the individual plant docs not appear quite so con- 

 spicuously in plant husbandry as docs the individual in ani- 

 mal husbandry, it is still never a negligible, and is often an 

 important element. This is especially true in horticulture, 

 where individual performance is subject to much the kind of 

 testing that is applied to the individual animal, namely that 

 of seasonal repetition. In a well kept orchard, for example, 

 the individual tree holds a prominent place. 



To question the reality of the individual cow or apple 

 tree would be, to a breeder or orchardist, equivalent to 

 questioning the reality of any such animal at all as a cow, 

 or any such plant as an apple tree. Yet a considerable 

 number of zoologists and botanists have been thrown into a 

 distracted state of mind as to the reality of the individual, 

 especially among the lower orders of plants and animals. 

 Botanists have been particularly subject to this malady, 

 obviously because in none of the plants, not even the highest, 

 are the individuals so thoroughly integrated as they are in 

 most animals, particularly in the higher classes. And so, 

 as we shall see presently, some speculative botanists have 

 gone to the ridiculous extreme of asserting that there is no 

 such thing as an individual plant. 



What, exactly, is the matter with biological reasoning 

 which lands men in such absurdities? For absurdities they 

 surely are, even though given the habiliments of science. 

 Test the matter this way : If I look at a tree and a man 

 standing beside each other, there is, so far as this observa- 

 tion is concerned, not a shred of valid objection against 

 applying the term "individual" to each. The one is an 

 individual tree and the other an individual man, and the 

 individuality of neither is a whit less certain or more cer- 

 tain than that of the other, as I now perceive the two. 



But as I now perceive the two is exactly what we are 

 here discussing. For anybody to contend that one of these 

 beings — the man' — is an individual, while the other — the tree 



