GENERAL MORPHOLOGY. 127 



frequently remain in connection with the parent plant, offering for 

 our consideration one collective individual (a compound plant, 

 plaitta composita). If only organs of propagation, or blossoms, 

 proceed from the buds, we still term the plant simple. This com- 

 position is repeated in innumerable gradations. 



Much has been written and disputed concerning the conception of 

 the individual, without, however, elucidating the subject, principally 

 owing to the misconception that still exists as to the origin of the con- 

 ception. Now the individual is no conception, but the mere subjective com- 

 prehension of an actual object, presented to us under some given specific 

 conception, and on this latter it alone depends whether the object is or 

 is not an individual. Under the specific conception of the solar system, 

 ours is an individual: in relation to the specific conception of a planetary 

 body, it is an aggregate of many individuals. There is, therefore, no 

 sense in contending as to whether a certain object is or is not an indi- 

 vidual in the vegetable world, until the conception of the species, the 

 plant, be perfectly defined. Now I have already shown in the intro- 

 duction that we have hitherto been unable to comprehend plants col- 

 lectively, with any degree of scientific perspicuity in a definite con- 

 ception, but have merely given them in rough outline. The manner 

 in which we take up the materials we have become acquainted with, 

 and apply them as temporary scientific aids in defining the conceptions 

 of the species of plants, is purely arbitrary, and can at most only give 

 rise to a contest upon the applicability of this or that definition. I 

 think, however, that, looking at the indubitable facts already mentioned, 

 and the relations treated of in the course of these considerations, it will 

 appear most advantageous and most useful, in a scientific point of view, 

 to consider the vegetable cell as the general type of the plant (simple 

 plant of the first order). Under this conception, Protococcus and other 

 plants consisting of only one cell, and the spore and pollen-granule, will 

 appear as individuals. Such individuals may, however, again, with a 

 partial renunciation of their individual independence, combine under 

 definite laws into definite forms (somewhat as the individual animals 

 do in the globe of the Volvox globator). These again appear empirically 

 as individual beings, under a conception of a species (simple plants of 

 the second order) derived from the form of the normal connection of the 

 elementary individuals. But we cannot stop here, since Nature herself 

 combines these individuals, under a definite form*, into larger associa- 

 tions, whence we draw the third conception of the plant, from a con- 

 nection, as it were, of the second power (compound plants plants of 

 the third order). The simple plant proceeding from the combination of 

 the elementary individuals is then termed a bud (gemma), in the compo- 

 sition of plants of the third order. This last conception, however, admits 

 only of strict application where the form of the connection of the ele- 

 mentary individuals is quite regularly defined ; and this we first meet with 

 from Mosses upward ; the connection being so loose in the AIg<z, Lichens, 

 and Fungi, that we cannot well distinguish between an individual 

 development of the plant, and a repeated composition of the same ; or, in 

 other words, between growth and the formation of buds (gemmation . 

 We regard them provisionally as simple plants (of the second order). 



* " Gcmmze totidem hcrba?," Linnc. Phil. Bot. 132. We find this relation already 

 correctly conceived hero. 



