ON THE MORPHOLOGICAL VIEW OF NATURE. 261 



and for different purposes. The fact that the organisa- 

 tion of the higher animals, which, for medical reasons, is 

 more interesting, can be roughly divided into a variety 

 of separate organs or systems of organs, each of which 

 can be, to some extent, studied by itself as we study 

 the parts and workings of a machine, and that for the 

 physician greater interest attaches to the functions of 

 these organs, placed anatomy for a long time under the 

 influence of physiology, which is the science of the per- 

 formance, not of the structure, of the parts of living crea- 

 tures. Phytotomy, on the other side, was for a long time 

 neglected, awaiting the greater perfection of the micro- 

 scope. Thus it came about that down to nearly the 

 middle of the century the morphological study of animals 

 and that of plants were pursued without much mutual 

 benefit or regard. The phytotomists of the seventeenth 

 century had established the fact that plants are built up 

 of minute parts called variously utricles, bladders, vesicles, 

 but mostly cells, and which were compared with the 

 structure of the foam of beer or the cells of a honey- 

 comb. 1 Different forms were assigned to these cavities, 



1 Aug. Pyr. de Candolle begins 

 his ' Organographie ' (1827) with 

 the words : " La nature intime des 

 vegetaux, vue aux plus forts micro- 

 scopes, offre peu de diversite"s. Les 

 plantes les plus disparates par leurs 

 formes extlrieures, se ressemblent 

 a 1'interieur h un degrd vraiment 

 extraordinaire," &c. ; and after 

 going back to the observations of 

 Malpighi and Grew, and referring 

 to the recent ones of Mirbel, Link, 

 Treviranus, Sprengel, Rudolphi 

 Kieser, Dutrochet, and Amici, men- 

 tions Kieser's ' Memoire sur 1'Organ- 



isation des Plantes ' (Harlem, 1812) 

 as the only French book which con- 

 tains an account of the phytotomic 

 researches carried on by the Ger- 

 mans, who, after the lapse of a cen- 

 tury, were the first to take up 

 these studies again. In the second 

 chapter De Candolle says : " Le 

 tisau cellulaire, conside're' en masse, 

 est un tissu membraneux forme" par 

 un grand nombre de cellules ou de 

 cavitds closes de toutes parts ; 

 1'^cume de la biere ou un rayon 

 de miel en donnent une ide"e gross- 

 iere mais assez exacte" (p. 11). 



