CHAPTER II. 



PHYTOTOMY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 



MALPIGHI had no successor of note in Italy; in England 

 the new light was extinguished with Hooke and Grew, and 

 has so remained, we may almost say, till the present day ; in 

 Holland also Leeuwenhoek found none to follow him of equal 

 rank with himself, and the work done in Germany up to the 

 year 1770 is more wretched than can well be imagined. There 

 was in fact no original phytotomic research in the first fifty or 

 sixty years of the last century ; the accounts which were given 

 of the structure of plants were taken from Malpighi, Grew, and 

 Leeuwenhoek by persons, who, unable to observe themselves, 

 did not understand their authors and stated things not to be 

 found in their writings. The feebler and obscurer notions of 

 the older writers were preserved with a particular preference, 

 and thus it was Grew's complicated idea of the web-like 

 structure of cell-walls that made most impression on those 

 who reported him. This state of decline must not be ascribed 

 to imperfect microscopes only ; these certainly were not good, 

 and still less conveniently fitted up ; but no one saw and 

 described clearly even what can be seen with the naked eye 

 or with very small magnifying power; the worst part of the 

 case was that no one tried fully to understand either the little 

 he saw himself or the observations to be found in older works, 

 but contented himself from want of reflection with most misty 

 notions of the inner structure of plants. It is not easy to 

 discover the causes of this decline in phytotomy in the first 

 half of the i8th century; but one of the most important 

 appears to lie in the circumstance, that botanists, following in 



