NA TURE 



529 



A MALPIGHI BICENTENARY VOLUME. 



Marcello Malpighi e Fopera sua. Scritti varii. Pp. 338. 

 (Milan : Vallardi, 1897.) 



THE great Malpighi — Marcello Malpighi — to give him 

 his full name, anatomist, physiologist, botanist? 

 pathologist, biologist, and above all natural philosopher, 

 striking and powerful man of science in the latter half 

 of the seventeenth century, was born on March 10, 1628, 

 in the house of his father, a farmer in easy circumstances 

 in the outskirts of the town of Crevalore, which lies in 

 the neighbourhood of Bologna. 



Last year the town of Crevalore, with the help of 

 others, erected in its market-place, opposite the town 

 hall, a bronze statue of their great townsman as a tangible 

 token of how much they felt his worth. Dr. Pizzoli, the 

 Secretary of the Committee for the erection of the monu- 

 ment, conceived the happy idea of combining with the 

 memorialof bronze one of another kind — one which should 

 not be stationary at Crevalore, but wander far and wide — 

 a printed book in which several men of science of different 

 lands and pursuing different paths of inquiry might state 

 what they knew and thought of their great common 

 master of old times. Circumstances prevented the two 

 memorials being completed in 1894, which would have 

 been the bicentenary of Malpighi's death, this taking 

 place on November 29, 1694 ; but the statue was unveiled 

 last November, and the memorial volume is now before 

 the world. 



It would be out of place in a notice such as this 

 to dwell at length on Malpighi's place in the history of 

 biological science, or to attempt to discuss the value of 

 his many and varied labours. I must content myself with 

 giving a brief account of the contents of this memorial 

 volume. 



The several contributions are very varied, both in length 

 and character ; and as one reads them in succession, a 

 great deal of repetition is met with ; but this is unavoid- 

 able in a work written in the way in which this is written ; 

 and it may at least be said that all the contributions will 

 reward perusal. 



G. Atti (of Bologna) gives a biographical sketch, 

 the shortness of which is, I cannot help thinking, much 

 X.0 be regretted ; and though Prof. Atti has written at 

 length elsewhere, I feel sure that a fuller relation of Mal- 

 pighi's life, some genial narration of his personal story 

 free from any critical account of his scientific labours, 

 would have been a very acceptable addition to the 

 volume. 



Virchow contributes an eloge, Haeckel an appreciative 

 ^estimate of Malpighi as a philosophic naturalist, De 

 Michelis (of Ravenna) an essay on Malpighi's place in the 

 History of Thought, Todaro (of Rome) a sympathetic view 

 of him as a pioneer in biological studies and as an 

 advocate of experimental medicine being considered as 

 an integral part of the study of living things, and De 

 Giovanni (of Padua) an exposition of his place in the de- 

 velopment of pathological science. All these are short, 

 while the contribution of Weiss (of Messina), entitled a 

 general introduction, dealing as it does with the several 

 NO. 1484, VOL. 57] 



aspects of Malpighi's scientific activity, is necessarily 

 longer. 



Kolliker supplies a very brief but pregnant and ad- 

 mirable statement of the many notable discoveries in 

 general anatomy which we owe to Malpighi, Romiti (of 

 Pisa) an estimate, also short, of Malpighi's place in the 

 history of topographical human anatomy, while Eternod 

 (of Geneva) dwells more in detail on his worth as being 

 one of the earliest to grasp the value of that research 

 into minute structure, whether of plants or animals, 

 which we now call Histology, and indeed as being one 

 of the founders of a branch of biological science which 

 has, especially in these latter days, gathered in so many 

 and such important truths. Cattaneo (of Genoa) expounds 

 at length and in detail the great man's many and varied 

 contributions to comparative anatomy ; and Perroncito (of 

 Turin) adds a detailed account, which by reason of its very 

 detail is most interesting, of Malpighi's famous work on 

 the silk worm, " De Bombyce." It will be remembered 

 that Malpighi was led to undertake this investigation in 

 consequence of a letter which the Royal Society of London 

 addressed to him, through the hand of its Secretary 

 Oldenburgh, and that the volume containing the account 

 of the investigation was published by and on the financial 

 responsibility of the Royal Society, being the first of a 

 series of works by Malpighi thus published. Indeed 

 after this onward nearly all Malpighi's inquiries were 

 published by the Royal Society. 



We learn from Dr. Pizzoli's sympathetic preface that it 

 had been intended to include a contribution on Malpighi 

 as an embryologist, one of Malpighi's works being " De 

 formatione pulli in ovo." Through misadventure this in- 

 tention failed ; but the value of Malpighi's work in this 

 direction is touched upon by more than one of the con- 

 tributors just mentioned. 



Two contributions deal with Malpighi's botanical re- 

 searches. At its meeting of December 7, 1671, there was 

 read before the Royal Society a preliminary sketch by 

 Malpighi of his botanical investigations under the title of 

 " Anatomes Plantarum Idea " ; and at the same meeting 

 our countryman Nehemiah Grew laid before the Society a 

 copy of his work entitled "The Anatomy of Plants begun," 

 which the Society in the previous spring had ordered to be 

 printed. Much controversy has arisen in respect to the 

 relative merits of Malpighi and Grew as the founders of 

 the anatomy of plants. One of the above two contribu- 

 tions is a short essay by Strasburger in which, while 

 giving Grew all his due as an original inquirer, he claims 

 for Malpighi a higher place as being a mind of wider 

 grasp, as being one who in investigating plants was seek- 

 ing a clue to the secrets not of plants only but of all living 

 things. The other contribution, by Morini, is much longer 

 and deals in detail with all Malpighi's botanical studies, 

 incidentally touching also on the controversy about Grew, 

 and giving a brief sketch of the condition of botany before 

 Malpighi began his work. 



I have myself contributed a condensed account of Mal- 

 pighi's relations with the Royal Society, explaining in a 

 simple manner how the correspondence between the one 

 and the other began, how the Society undertook in suc- 

 cession the publication of Malpighi's most important 

 works, and hew cordial and close was the intercourse 

 between the great Italian inquirer and the learned 



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