The President's Address. By Wm. Carruthers. 131 



This short narrative indicates the stage which botanical studies 

 had reached in England and elsewhere, when Grew entered upon his 

 investigations. The Microscope had not been used for botanical 

 research. Cornelius Drebbel is said to have brought the first com- 

 pound Microscope to England from Holland in 161 9. There is no 

 record of any scientific use being made of it. The first application 

 of the Microscope to the examination of the minute structure of 

 plants was made by Eobert Hooke. He was one of the original 

 Fellows of the Eoyal Society, and was elected Secretary in 1677. 

 Hooke was a very learned and ingenious man. He constructed 

 simple Microscopes, and greatly improved the compound Microscope. 

 His methods are clearly described in the Preface (p. 22, &c), to his 

 ' Micrographia.' published in 1667 ; and a figure of the Microscope 

 which he as well as Grew used in their investigations is given in the 

 first plate of that work. 



Grew was born at Mancaster, in Warwickshire, where his father 

 Obadiah Grew was schoolmaster. His father afterwards entered the 

 Church, and succeeded the famous Puritan clergyman Richard Vines, 

 at St. Michael's, Coventry, in which city Nehemiah spent his youth 

 and received his early education. He was a student at Pembroke Hall, 

 Cambridge, taking his B.A. in 1661. The illustrious John Kay, who 

 had studied at St. Catherine's Hall and then in Trinity College, had 

 been from 1651 lecturer in that College, in Greek, Mathematics aud 

 Latin successively. In 1660 Eay published his ' Catalogus I'lan- 

 tarum circa Cantabrigiam nascentium,' which contained a list of 

 626 species that he had collected in the neighbourhood of Cam- 

 bridge. We may indulge the supposition that Grew during the 

 years of his attendance at Pembroke Hall, may have been known to 

 Eay and may have accompanied him in some of his " simpliug " 

 walks. Grew's published works show that he was well acquainted 

 with British plants. He everywhere writes freely about them, and 

 in his ' Anatomy of Seeds ' he figures with singular fidelity the seeds 

 of forty of our native plants. 



On leaving Cambridge Grew went to Leyden to study medicine. 

 After receiving his M.D. there he returned in 1664, and settled at 

 Coventry to practise. A great change had taken place while he was 

 in Holland, consequent on the Kestoration in 1660. His father re- 

 mained vicar of St. Michael's till August 1662, when the Act of 

 Uniformity, passed in the previous May, was enforced. Obadiah 

 Grew was one of the two thousand clergy who were unable to 

 accept the terms of the oath required by that Act, and who were in 

 consequence ejected from their livings. He suffered much, and was 

 in prison for six months, because he was found living in Coventry in 

 contravention of the Five Mile Act. 



The circumstances that led Grew to the minute study of plants 

 are thus narrated in the preface to his 'Anatomy of Plants,' 1682. 

 He says : — " The first occasion of directing my thoughts this way 



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