organisms. Then, after comparing his conclusions with 

 Blumenbach's and Bom's ($ 30 - 36), Wolff discussed, in 

 detail, the question about the means of movement of the 

 nourishing juices, and he arrived at the conclusion that in 

 the nourished parts there are no intervals and that the 

 juices penetrate through a confluent substance ($ 37 - 66 

 and 69 - 71) . With that, he considered it as beyond doubt 

 that the nourishing force could not be anything other than an 

 attractive power ($ 67 - 68) . 



Wolff identified the attractive and repulsive power 

 with the specific essential force of the plant and animal 

 substance; hence, all the preceeding represents only an 

 introduction to two basic parts of the work which consider 

 the particularities of the essential force in the two living 

 kingdoms. In the first part, which he entitled "About the 

 distinguishing features of the specific essential force in 

 the plant substance," Wolff confirmed that plants and their 

 characteristic plant life do not develop as a result of 

 attractive and repulsive forces which are common for all 

 nature or of forces connected with the organization of the 

 plant bodies. Hence the essential force, in his opinion, 

 should be distinguished from those forces ($ 72 - 79) . 



In the light of the conference works, published in 1784, 

 this was a basic question: if the attractive force represents 

 the cause of movement of the nutritional juices, then is it 

 identical with the general attractive force which is inherent 

 to all the bodies of nature, or if it is distinguished from 

 it? Wolff remarked that this question was not even mentioned 

 in any of the submitted works, although two of them 

 contain a note that the authors considered the nourishing 

 force as the usual force of attraction. "This question is 

 of great importance and is easily solved," Wolff wrote. If 

 the subject was as the authors thought, then plants, which 

 are fitted with a general attractive force and acquire 

 organization, could only be machines, distinguished from 

 artificial machines only by their structures. In this case 

 it would have been possible to construct from any material 

 which is provided with a general attractive force, a model 

 which not only in its external form but also in its internal 

 structure could have been similar to one or another plant, 

 such as the Tragopan pratensis L. This model must grow like 



108 



