Dr. A. Braun on the Vegetable Individual. 247 



call plants, and here silently hold their dances and celebrate 

 their orgies *." 



Farther than this we cannot go : if we did, we should have to 

 leave specific vegetable life, and, instead of investigating its most 

 minute spheres of formation, the visible cells, vesicles, granules 

 or monads, turn to the invisible individua f of brute matter, so 

 as to consider plants as phjenomena of appellant and repellant, 

 coherent and incoherent atoms. If we must understand by an 

 individual, a being perfectly simple and indivisible, this is our 

 last refuge, in which we may indeed reach an individual, but not 

 a vegetable individual ; for this would then be identical with the 

 material individual common to all corporeal existence. But, even 

 if we could give up all hopes of a specific vegetable individual, 

 doubt would still linger round these physical iudinduals ; for even 

 the existence of the universal primary particles of bodies — the 

 mateiial individuals, the atoms, — is not conclusively established. 

 No eye has seen them ; we do not even think of considering them 

 as objects of direct perception ; we only accept them as an hypo- 

 thesis, to eke out our theories of motion and of chemical affinity ; 

 and to enable us to compute their relations. The question might 

 easily be asked, whether the same phsenomena may not be as 

 well explained by assuming the continuity, expansibility, and 

 penetrabihty of matter. However this may be, the question con- 

 cerning the existence of atoms certainly lies beyond the limits of 

 botanical investigation ; and if the existence of vegetable indi- 

 viduals depends on this question, the botanist must despair of 

 proving it. Thus the question at which we have now arrived is 

 this : can we speak of individuals in botany ? and this is identical 

 with another: are plants mere products of the operations of 

 matter {i. e. of a substance self-moving, uniting and separatino- 

 by an innate force), and hence non-entities, or mere phsenomena 

 resulting from, or produced by, the blind forces of nature ; or 

 may we ascribe to plants an independent existence in nature 

 notwithstanding their connexion with the external world ? 



If what we call plants are nothing but complex chemical and 

 physical j9roce5ses, then we can no longer speak of their individuals 

 and species in the sense the words usually bear ; for the mere 

 phsenomena of the operations of the primary substance, which 

 have no other efficient principle than the forces of this sub- 

 stance, cannot be regarded as self-existent beings, or as peculiar 

 (specihc) kinds of these beings, or as single (individual) modi- 

 fications of them. This is, in fact, the result towards which the 



* Mayer, Supplementc zum Lehre vom Kreislauf (18.3/), p. 49. Ian 

 acquainted with Mayer's views through Meyen's Pflanzenphys. ii. p. 256. 

 t Cicero calls the atoms "individua." 



