CHAP, n.] of Plants. Mariotte. 469 



but a detailed scheme for researches into botanical science, 

 and more particularly into the chemical part of it. There we 

 read, that plants must be burnt slowly, in order that the de- 

 stroying and transmuting power of the fire may have less 

 effect ; the * virtutes plantarum ' play an important part in the 

 chemical examination of plants, and blood was mixed with 

 their juices, in order to discover their properties. A writer 

 named Dedu in a treatise, ' De Fame des plantes' (1685) derived 

 the generation and growth of plants from the fermentation 

 and effervescence of the acids in combination with the alka- 

 lies, as Kurt Sprengel informs us. It is by comparison with 

 these and similar notions that we recognise the full superiority 

 of the utterances of Malpighi and Mariotte respecting the 

 nutrition of plants, and their sagacity is still further shown by 

 the fact, that there are some things which they forebore to say, 

 evidently because they thought that they were not clearly 

 proved. 



The views of Malpighi and Mariotte on the nutrition of 

 plants were respected and often quoted by their contempo- 

 raries and immediate successors; but as has happened in 

 other cases unfortunately up to recent times, much that was 

 fundamentally important and significant in them was neglected 

 from the first for comparatively unimportant matters, and the 

 views of these clear thinkers were so mixed up with indistinct 

 ideas and actual misconceptions, that no real advance was 

 made, though a variety of new facts were from time to time 

 brought to light. It has been already noticed that Malpighi's 

 correct idea of the connection of the leaves with the nutrition 

 of the plant was at a later time commonly supposed to be 

 equivalent to Major's theory of circulation, and since the 

 latter was for various reasons considered to be incorrect, it 

 was thought that Malpighi's view was dismissed with it. Yet 

 even Major's theory deserved the preference over the views of 

 those who assumed only an ascent of the sap in the wood, 

 because it at least attempted to account for certain phenomena 



