92 Malpighi and the Physiology [lect. 



duties of his chair kept him closely confined to the city; but 

 in the summer, when his lectures were over, it was his custom 

 to retire to some quiet spot in the country near. Here, free 

 from the interruptions incidental to a town life, he could give 

 unbroken attention to his inquiries ; the calm repose and the 

 pure air of the fields gave renewed vigour to his feeble frame ; 

 and, in the loving company of his devoted wife, he spent golden 

 days, observing, thinking and writing. 



While he was yet at Messina the fame of his discoveries 

 had reached the distant shores of England, and on his return to 

 Bologna he received in 1667, forwarded to him from Messina, a 

 letter from Oldenburg, the secretary to the newly established 

 and almost feverishly active Royal Society of London, inviting 

 him to a philosophic correspondence. That letter was the 

 beginning of a long and close intercourse between the Italian 

 philosopher and the English learned Society, one fruit of which 

 was that the Royal Society had the honour of publishing and 

 of bearing the expense of publication of the greater part of 

 Malpighi's works, in fact with some slight exceptions of all 

 the works which he produced after his return to Bologna. 



Were I to attempt to do full justice to the memory of 

 Malpighi I should have to go far beyond the limits of the 

 subject of these lectures. He was the founder of, he opened 

 up the path of inquiry in more than one branch of biological 

 knowledge. He with the Englishman Nehemiah Grew laid the 

 first sure foundations of vegetable morphology. While at 

 Messina, walking one day in the garden of his friend and 

 patron the Visconte Ruffo, snapping the branch of a chestnut 

 tree which overhung and obstructed the path along which the 

 two friends were walking his attention was arrested by the 

 vascular bundles, projecting and hanging down from the broken 

 end of the branch. This led him to study, and afterwards to 

 write an immortal book on the Anatomy of Plants. The first 

 sketch of this he sent to the Royal Society of London, which 

 subsequently published the full work, and the day, December 7, 

 1671, on which it was presented and read before the Society 

 happened to be the day on which Grew presented to the 

 Society his printed book ' The Anatomy of Vegetables begun/ 



