240 Dr. A.Bra'in on the Vegetable Individual. 



cvates* which are interpreted in this sense. In later times, 

 this view has been more or less advocated, especially by De la 

 Hiret, Linnseus, Darwin J, Batsch, Goethe, Roper, Schleiden §, 

 and others. 



But, even in this narrower view of vegetable individuality, the 

 same difficulty meets us ; for the shoot itself is divisible, and new 

 stocks may be produced by its parts ; i. e. by the members of the 

 stem and its leaf or leaf-whorl ||. Besides, the several members 

 of the shoot are not contemporaneous creations, but, developing 

 successively out of and over each other, they constitute a suc- 

 cessive generation, composed of divisions each of which repeats 

 essentially the same form, each of which may be compared to the 

 embryonic plant originally developed in the seed, and consisting 

 of its stemlet with one or two leaves (cotyledons). Thus the 

 shoot itself came to be regarded as a succession of individual 

 vegetable members, built up one above the other, like the stories 

 of a house. The earliest traces of this view may be found in 

 Darwin's ' Phytologia ' ^ ; it was developed at a later period in 

 various ways and with various modifications : e.g. by Agardh**, 



TTapa^Xaa-TaveLv), e. (J. the bulbous plauts ; but he does not state his 

 opinion of the parts which f]eveloi)e after such a separation, and explains 

 the phscnomena in general, by saying that the vegetable soul of plants 

 (6l)fTTTLKi] "^vx')) is simple in actuality (eVreXe;(eta), though multiple iu 

 capacity (Suwi/iet). 



* According to Moquin-Tandon, Teratologic, p. 5. 



t Hist, de I'Acad. Roy. des Sciences, 1/08, p. 2.'33. De la Hire regards 

 all the branches as new plants proceeding from hidden ovules. Myriads 

 of these ovules, he thinks, exist between the bark and the wood ; more or 

 less of them come to maturity, according to circumstances. 



X Darwin, Phytologia (1800), p. 1. " If a bud be torn from the branch 

 of a tree, or cut out and planted in the earth . . . . ; or if it be inserted into 

 the bark of another tree, it will grow and become a plant in every respect 

 like its parent. This evinces, that every bud of a tree is an individual ve- 

 getable being, and the tree therefore is a family or swarm of individual 

 plants . . . ." 



§ I shall consider the views of these authors more at large in the next 

 section. 



II I adduce this j)oint in connexion with the history of the views held by 

 botanists in regard to vegetable individuality, in the terms in which it 

 has been usually expressed ; further on I shall show that this view needs 

 qualification. The individual members of the stem cannot expand into a 

 new stock by direct develo])ment, like the se])arated shoot ; they have this 

 property oidy by being connected with a lateral sprout, by means of the 

 eye which they bear, or have the power of producing. This view naturally 

 brings us back to the shoot as the individual. 



^ P. 9; where even the single well-defined stem-members of different 

 iicrbaceous plants are descril)e(l as so many buds, and hence as so many 

 in<lividuals. 



** Agardh, Essai de reduire la Physiologic vegetale a dcs princi[)cs f'on- 

 damentaux, 182!) (Ann. des Sci. Nat. toni. xvii. p. 8(j). 



