140 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. FT. in. 



scope tell even a more wonderful tale, for he detected in 

 water and in the insides of animals those extremely minute 

 beings which he called animalcules. He showed that a 

 piece of the soft roe of the cod-fish not bigger than an ordi- 

 nary grain of sand might contain ten thousand of these living 

 creatures. When such tiny beings as these could be seen 

 and examined, I think you will acknowledge that I did not 

 speak too strongly when I said that the microscope has 

 opened out to us a new and marvellous world of life. 



Vegetable Anatomy, Grew and Malpighi, 1670.- 

 From insects Malpighi next turned to plants ; and it is 

 curious that at about the same time an English botanist 

 named Nehemiah Grew (born 1628, died 1711), who was se- 

 cretary to the Royal Society, also took up the same study ; 

 and the papers of the two men were laid before the Royal 

 Society on the same day in 1670. Malpighi's complete 

 work was afterwards published in 1674, and Grew's in 1682. 

 The investigations of these two men agreed in many re- 

 markable points ; they had both of them examined with 

 great care the flesh (if we may call it so) of plants, and they 

 described for the first time the tiny bags or cells of which 

 every part of a plant is made, and which you may easily see 



for yourself if you put a very thin piece 

 of the pulpy part of an apple, or better 

 still, of the pith of elder under the 

 microscope (see Fig. 22). They had 

 also noticed the long tubes which lie 

 among the woody fibres in the stringy 

 or fibrous part of a plant and in the 

 Cellular tissue from the ve i ns o f the leaves, and Grew had 



pith of the elder (Oliver). 



pointed out quite truly that these 

 tubes, which are called vessels or ducts t are composed of 



