178 Morphology under the Doctrine of [BOOKI. 



science, the latter being grievously misrepresented as material- 

 istic, its atoms qualified as dead, its forces as blind. It would 

 scarcely be guessed from Braun's account that the history of 

 philosophy could point to Bacon, Locke, and Kant, as well as 

 to Aristotle, that even the question of the individual had 

 been already handled by the schoolmen. A consideration of 

 the other point of view would have been all the more profitable, 

 since the author in the beginning of his treatise expresses the 

 opinion that the doctrine of the individual belongs to the 

 elements of botany ; it might certainly be maintained that it is 

 altogether superfluous. 



His train of thought in search of that which must be called 

 an individual in the vegetable kingdom is briefly as follows: 

 In forming a conception of the plant-individual as the unity of 

 a cycle of formation or a morphological whole, our chief 

 difficulty lies in the division into parts and the divisibility 

 (Getheiltheit und Theilbarkeit) which are present in the very 

 different stages of the organic structure of plants. It is requisite 

 therefore to find the middle way between the morphological 

 consideration of the individual plant which breaks up the 

 whole from above downwards, and the physiological which 

 extends it in the upward direction beyond all limits. Neither 

 the leaf-bearing shoots, though they are capable of developing 

 into independent plants, nor the parts of them, which have the 

 same power, neither the single cells, nor the granules they 

 contain, and least of all the atoms of dead matter which are 

 the sport of blind forces, would answer to the idea of the indi- 

 vidual in plants. We have therefore to decide which member 

 of this many-graded series of potences in the cycle of develop- 

 ment subordinated to the species deserves by preference the 

 name of individual (p. 48). A compromise is then made ; it 

 is sufficient to find a part of the plant which answers above all 

 others to the idea of the individual, for in this idea there must 

 be two genetic forces, multiplicity and unity. He then decides 

 for the shoot or bud. ' In contemplating the plant-stem which 



