CONTRIBUTIONS TO PHYTOGENESIS.[1]
THE general fundamental law of human reason, its undeviating tendency to unity in its acquisition of knowledge, has always been evinced in the department which treats of organized bodies as fully as in all other branches of science; and manifold have been the endeavours to establish the analogies between the two great divisions of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, But eminent as the men have been who have devoted their attention to this subject, it cannot be denied that all attempts which have been hitherto made with this view must be regarded as entirely unsuccessful. If, in- deed, the fact has of late been pretty generally admitted, still the reason of the circumstance has not always been quite correctly apprehended and put forth in its full precision and clearness. The cause of this, however, is, that the idea of individual, in the sense in which it occurs in animal nature, cannot in any way be applied to the vegetable world. It is only in the very lowest orders of plants, in some Algae and Fungi for instance, which consist only of a single cell, that we can speak of an individual in this sense. But every plant developed in any higher degree, is an aggregate of fully individualized, independent, separate beings, even the cells themselves.
Each cell leads a double life: an independent one, pertain- ing to its own development alone; and another incidental, in
- ↑ [These first appeared in Müller’s Archiv für Anatomie und Physiologie, Part II, 1838. But as they have been republished with some additional notes in a collected edition of Schleiden’s papers, entitled ‘Beiträge zur Botanik,’ I have made use of the latter work as my text; with the exception of the notes, I believe it corresponds precisely with the paper in Müller’s Archiv; which, it is also right I should state, has been already most faithfully translated by Mr. Francis, in Taylor’s ‘Scientific Memoirs,’ vol. ii, Part VI.—TRANSLATOR.]
