In the present article we will compare three processes for artificially producing plants: palingenesis, a process in which plants that have been reduced to their ashes or salts are resuscitated in the laboratory by chemical procedures; the production of metallic trees, artificial crystallizations produced by dissolving a metal in acid under special conditions; and plasmogenics, a study of the origin and nature of protoplasm through artificial synthesis of its primordial structures and functions. Making use of these comparisons a number of problems connected with the notions of body, life, individual, generation and physiology are discussed, with the goal of establishing some lines of continuity between historical and philosophical aspects of the life sciences and chemistry of the seventeenth, eighteenth and twentieth centuries.
Plant generation and physiology; Palingenesis; Metallic trees; Plasmogenics; Herrera; Resuscitation; History of biology; Philosophy of biology
