Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/198

 science, the latter being grievously misrepresented as materialistic, its atoms qualified as dead, its forces as blind. It would scarcely be guessed from Braun's account that the history of philosophy could point to Bacon, Locke, and Kant, as well as to Aristotle, that even the question of the individual had been already handled by the schoolmen. A consideration of the other point of view would have been all the more profitable, since the author in the beginning of his treatise expresses the opinion that the doctrine of the individual belongs to the elements of botany; it might certainly be maintained that it is altogether superfluous.

His train of thought in search of that which must be called an individual in the vegetable kingdom is briefly as follows: In forming a conception of the plant-individual as the unity of a cycle of formation or a morphological whole, our chief difficulty lies in the division into parts and the divisibility (Getheiltheit und Theilbarkeit) which are present in the very different stages of the organic structure of plants. It is requisite therefore to find the middle way between the morphological consideration of the individual plant which breaks up the whole from above downwards, and the physiological which extends it in the upward direction beyond all limits. Neither the leaf-bearing shoots, though they are capable of developing into independent plants, nor the parts of them, which have the same power, neither the single cells, nor the granules they contain, and least of all the atoms of dead matter which are the sport of blind forces, would answer to the idea of the individual in plants. We have therefore to decide which member of this many-graded series of potences in the cycle of development subordinated to the species deserves by preference the name of individual (p. 48). A compromise is then made; it is sufficient to find a part of the plant which answers above all others to the idea of the individual, for in this idea there must be two genetic forces, multiplicity and unity. He then decides for the shoot or bud. 'In contemplating the plant-stem which