Nature and Individuality

Abstract

In 1827 the great Geneva botanist Auguste-Pyrame de Candolle devoted a chapter of his massive Organographie végétale to the question of the individuality of plants and reached conclusions which were highly paradoxical to common sense:

According to the first opinion, which we habitually follow in ordinary language, a willow, a cherry tree, a cabbage, etc. are so many unique individuals; but, as soon as we examine them more closely we find that these so-called individuals are strangely divisible: almost all of their parts are susceptible to being at will separated from the whole, and of forming a new individual (being). This division can even be stretched indefinitely and there are some individuals, such as for instance the first weeping willow to be brought to Europe (I choose this example because we only have one of the sexes and it has never been sown) that, as I say, simply by division has produced all the weeping willows existing in Europe today and will produce all the ones we will want to produce in the future. From a physiological point of view all these willows are then portions of only one individual. In this sense, the word individual would be even less exact than if we consider a granite mountain as a mineralogical individual that man can at his will divide into as many fragments as he wants by crushing the rocks.¹

De Candolle also gave news of the existence of animals that, though apparently unique, upon a closer examination reveal that they are nothing but agglomerates that have a life in common, such as botrylles, pyrosomes and maybe the hydras and fresh water polyps that, after Trembley’s observations, were of such interest in the XVIIIth century. A superficial observation of vegetable organisms and of these extremely primitive animals would only extend to them the characteristics belonging to animals of a higher order which, like ourselves, since they have only one centre of nutrition and life, cannot be divided into further individuals.²