Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/65

 stomach, while their main trunk ascends to the heart and the head.' Here, in genuine Aristotelian fashion, the facts are forced into a previously constructed scheme.

Cesalpino's discussion of the seat of the soul in plants is of special interest in connection with certain views of later botanists. 'Whether any one part in plants can be assigned as the seat of the soul, such as the heart in animals, is a matter for consideration—for since the soul is the active principle ('actus') of the organic body, it can neither be 'tota in toto' nor 'tota in singulis partibus,' but entirely in some one and chief part, from which life is distributed to the other dependent parts. If the function of the root is to draw food from the earth, and of the stem to bear the seeds, and the two cannot exchange functions, so that the root should bear seeds and the shoot penetrate into the earth, there must either be two souls different in kind and separate in place, the one residing in the root, the other in the shoot, or there must be only one, which supplies both with their peculiar capabilities. But that there are not two souls of different kinds and in a different part in each plant may be argued thus; we often see a root cut off from a plant send forth a shoot, and in like manner a branch cut off send a root into the ground, as though there were a soul indivisible in its kind present in both parts. But this would seem to show that the whole soul is present in both parts, and that it is wholly in the whole plant, if there were not this objection that, as we find in many cases, the capabilities are distributed between the two parts in such a way that the shoot, though buried in the ground, never sends out roots, for example in Pinus and Abies, in which plants also the roots that are cut off perish.' This, he thinks, proves that there is only one soul residing in root and stem, but that it is not present in all the parts; in a further discussion he seeks to discover the true seat of the soul. He points out an anatomical distinction between the shoot and the root; the root consists of the rind and an inner substance which in some cases is hard and woody, in