Chap, iv.] Metamorphosis and of the Spiral Theory. 1 79 



is usually branched, especially a tree with its many branches, 

 mere instinctive feeling awakens the suspicion that it is not 

 a single being, a single life, to be classed with the individual 

 animal or individual man, but that it is a world of united 

 individuals which spring from one another in a succession of 

 generations,' etc. He proceeds to show that this conception, 

 arising as it does from a sound, natural feeling, is also con- 

 firmed by scientific examination. It appears, however, that 

 many phenomena in the growth of plants will not fall in well 

 with this instinctive feeling, and so he says at page 69, ' We 

 cut the Gordian knot in this way, that if we have other and 

 sufficient grounds for regarding branches as individuals, we 

 come to the determination to let every branch pass for an indi- 

 vidual, however strongly the appearance may be against it.' 

 The shoot is therefore the morphological individual in the 

 plant, and is analogous to the individual animal. It may 

 certainly be objected, that we may cut the knot in another way 

 and maintain with Schleiden that the cells are the individuals 

 in the vegetable kingdom, if we do not actually arrive by the 

 same path at calling each atom, or at the other end of the 

 scale the whole self-nourishing plant, an individual, for about 

 equally strong reasons might be adduced for both one and the 

 other of these views. It all depends on the point of view we 

 adopt in such speculations, and on the weight we allow to 

 instinctive feeling in establishing scientific ideas. Braun 

 declares very decidedly in page 39 against the notion that the 

 invisible ' individua ' or atoms of dead matter can be introduced 

 into the consideration of the plant-individual, as though the 

 plant were a mere concrete of mutually attracting and repelling 

 atoms. If, he says, we will understand by the term individual 

 something absolutely indivisible, this is certainly the last resort, 

 but then we shall have no plant-individual. Moreover, no eye 

 has ever seen these atoms ; their assumption is a mere hypo- 

 thesis, which we may confront with the other hypothesis of the 

 continuity and permeability of matter. The question therefore, 



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