Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/199

 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 confirmed 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 individual, 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 hypothesis, which we may confront with the other hypothesis of the continuity and permeability of matter. The question therefore,