THE ANATOMY OF TRUNKS 51 



which You are pleas'd to shine." It shews how strong the 

 influence of fashion can be, when we find such bombast coming 

 from the pen of a man who, only a few lines earlier, has written, 

 with the perfection of simplicity, " Withal, I looked upon Nature 

 as a Treasure so infinitely full, that as all men together cannot 

 exhaust it ; so no man, but may find out somewhat therein, if he 

 be resolved to try." 



The most important part of this treatise is the account of the 

 comparative structure of roots, to which we will return later, when 

 discussing Grew's anatomical conceptions. With regard to the 

 position of the plant in the soil, he held somewhat mystical 

 views. He believed that the " air-vessels," or tracheal elements, 

 tended to draw the plant upwards, and the roots to pull it 

 downwards. He says, for example, that the upper part of the 

 roots of most seedlings ascend, because the first leaves being 

 large and standing in the open air, "the Air-vessels in them 

 have a dominion over the young Root, and so yielding them- 

 selves to the sollicitation of the Air upwards ', draw the Root in 

 part after them." 



In 1675 appeared Grew's third botanical work, The Com- 

 parative Anatomy of Trunks, which dealt with stem structure, 

 as the previous work dealt with root structure. There is, in the 

 British Museum, a particularly interesting copy of this book, 

 which is elaborately annotated in manuscript. From internal 

 evidence it seems almost certain that this is the author's copy, 

 corrected in his own handwriting 1 . Some, though not by any 

 means all, of the corrections are identical with the alterations 

 found in the 1682 edition. Above the first plate is written 

 "vide ye Book Interleavd," and we may perhaps hazard the 

 guess that in this copy we have Grew's first suggestions, whilst 

 those which he finally adopted in the second edition were inserted 

 in the interleaved copy whose whereabouts, if it still exists, is 

 unknown at the present time. 



PI. 6 shews a typical page from the annotated copy. At 



1 By the courtesy of the Council of the Royal Society, I have been able to compare 

 these annotations with certain manuscript letters of Nehemiah Grew's preserved in the 

 Society's Library. This comparison confirms the view that the annotations are in 

 Grew's own handwriting. 



42 



