Dr. x\. Braun on the Vegetable Individual. 333 XXXTI. — The Vegetable Individual, in its relation to Species. By Di". Alexander Braun, Professor of Botany in the Univer-sity of Berlin, &c.* Translated by Chas. Francis Stone. [Continued from p. 256.] Part II. As I attempted to show in Part I., whatever seems arbitraiy and indefinite in the existing views of what constitutes the Ve-getable Individual has its ground in the nature of plants them-selves, which in their realization are resolved into a plurality which they are not capable of reducing to as complete a unity as animals are. As we ascend in the natural kingdoms, indivi-duals increase in importance, until they reach their most perfect independence in Man. Hence, if we would appreciate them justly in the lower departments, in which theii-character is less definite, we must tiy to comprehend the less perfect structures by starting from the more perfect ones : to appreciate vegetable individuals we must start from a comparison of animal indivi-duals. From this point of view we perceive at once that the cell cannot be regarded as the proper individual in plants, otherwise it would have to be considered in the same manner in animals. Cell-formation is a property common to plants and animals : but in animals it appears far more obviously as a subordinate ele-ment iu the organization of the whole body, than it does in plants ; since the animal cell, in most cases, is not so independ-ent, nor so determinate, nor so permanently isolated as the vege-table cell. For this reason, too, it is rarer to find the animal cell considered as the proper animal individual, although Schwann has shown that animal cells are analogous to vegetable cells, and may be as justly considered individual organisms as they. Yet as mere curiosa we might adduce the somewhat similar assertion of Gaillon, that " men and animals are properly masses of Infu-soria •'' and Oken^s doctrine of generation, " a synthesis of Infu-soria," might, pei-haps, be interpreted in the same sense. The "stories'' of the axes, the internodes with their leaves, might claim to be compared with the animal individual with more jus-tice than the cell, especially if leaf-formation really took place, as the defenders of such doctrines have represented ; that is, if every successive leaf were produced as a new structure out of the old one (out of its base which becomes the interaode), and if the whole stem were thus merely a concatenation of leaves shooting out of and growing above each other. But this is not so : the rudiment of the stem as an uninterrupted growth ("conti-* Reprinted from Silliman's American Jom-nal for September 1855.
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