INDIVIDUALS. 353 



So that for practical purposes, and in a loose, general sense, we 

 take the whole plant as an individual, so long as it forms one con- 

 nected mass, and no longer. But in a philosophical view we cannot 

 well regard this congeries as the true vegetable individual. 



687. Accordingly many botanists (of whom are Thouars at the 

 beginning of the present century, and Braun * at the present day) 

 regard as the true individual the shoot, or simple axis with its foli- 

 age, &c., whether this be the primary stem with its roots implanted 

 in the soil, or a branch implanted on the stem. This view simpli- 

 fies our conception of a vegetable, but is itself open to all the objec- 

 tions it raises against the individuality of the plant as a whole. For 

 just as the herb, shrub, or tree is divisible into shoots or series of 

 similar axes, so the shoot is divisible into similar component parts, 

 or phytons (163), indefinitely repeated, and which may equally give 

 rise to independent plants. Those philosophical naturalists, there- 

 fore, who find no stable ground in this position, are forced towards 

 one of two opposite extremes. Some, justly viewing sexual repro- 

 duction as of the highest import, are led to regard the whole vege- 

 tative product of a seed as theoretically constituting one individual, 

 whether the successive growths remain united, or whether they form 

 a thousand or a million of vegetables, as may often happen. Ac- 

 cording to this view, all the Weeping-Willow trees of this country 

 are parts of one individual ; and most of our Potato plants must be- 

 long to one multitudinous individual, while others wholly similar, but 

 freshly grown from seed, are- each individuals of themselves ; — a 

 view which apparently amounts to an absurdity in terms and in fact. 

 Others, following out the idea mentioned above, and laying the main 

 stress upon simplicity and indivisibility, rather than upon tendency 

 to separation, regard the phyton in ordinary plants, and the cell in 

 those of lowest grade, as on the whole best answering, in the vege- 

 table kingdom, to the simple individual in the animal. But tliis is 

 merely a question of greater or less analogy. For the individual, in 

 the proper sense of the term, is more or less confluent into a vegeta- 

 tive cycle in all plants, and in many of the lower animals, and attains 

 full realization only in the higher grades of organized existence. 



* See his elaborate treatise, On the Vegetable Individual in its Relation to Species 

 (of wliidi a translatiou from the German, by C. P. Stone, was published in the 

 American Journal of Science and the Arts, vols. 19 and 20, 1855), for the com- 

 pletest development of this view, and for the history of the subject generally. 



30* 



