CHAP, i.] by Malpighi and Grew. 233 



it. The chief emphasis is laid on the consideration of the way in 

 which the fibrous tissue connects with the succulent parenchyma, 

 while such questions as the nature of the cell, the fibre, and the 

 vessel are only incidentally touched upon or discussed at 

 greater length in the course of the exposition. The mode of 

 investigation and exposition is therefore chiefly analytic, while 

 in modern compendiums of phytotomy it is essentially syn- 

 thetic. It need scarcely be said that with this mode of 

 treatment the questions which are now regarded as funda- 

 mentally important are either treated as of secondary moment, 

 or are disregarded ; we must not therefore, in judging of the 

 merit of these men, approach their works with the demands 

 upon them which our more advanced science would lead us to 

 make. It would be quite wrong even to think of measuring 

 the value of their books by the extent to which their contents 

 agree with the modern cell-theory. Both of them had enough to 

 do to find their way at all in the new world which the micro- 

 scope had revealed ; many questions which have become trivial 

 for us had then to be solved for the first time, and the chief 

 merit of both lies in this very effort to understand first of all 

 the coarser relations of the anatomical structure of plants ; in 

 this respect the study of their works may yet be recommended 

 to beginners, because modern phytotomical books are generally 

 very imperfect on these points. And yet we must not under- 

 value what Malpighi and Grew had to say on the more delicate 

 anatomy, and especially on the nature of the solid framework of 

 cell-membrane in the plant ; imperfect and crude as their views 

 on such points may be, yet they continued for more than a 

 hundred years to be the foundation of all that was known 

 about cellular structure ; and when phytotomy took a new 

 flight at the beginning of the present century, Malpighi's and 

 Crew's scattered remarks on the union of cells with one 

 another, and on the structure of fibres and vessels, were 

 adopted by the later phytotomists and connected with their 

 own investigations. 



