HIS WRITINGS 199 



Among Henfrey's original contributions other than those 

 deah'ng with the burning questions already mentioned, was a 

 series dealing with the Anatomy of Monocotyledons. This 

 would appear to have led him on to study the Nymphaeaceae, 

 and especially the anatomy of Victoria regia a paper which may 

 be compared perhaps with Prof. Gwynne-Vaughan's more recent 

 study. Henfrey was quite alive to the monocotyledonous affinity, 

 and the enlightened and, for that date, unconventional views 

 to which he gave expression, drew an interesting notice by 

 Hooker and Thomson in the first volume of their Indian 

 Flora. 



Another of his papers dealt rather fully with the development 

 of the spores and elaters of Marchantia, where he filled in a 

 considerable lacuna in the knowledge of that group. It is curious 

 to find as late as 1855 so intelligent and well informed a botanist 

 as Henfrey laying it down that the cells of Marchantia, in par- 

 ticular, and Liverworts in general, were destitute of nuclei. 

 It is superfluous to say that this apprehension was quite baseless. 

 Indeed, forty years later, the group of the Liverworts was de- 

 liberately chosen by Prof. J. B. Farmer, for the investigation of 

 nuclear phenomena on account of the favourable conditions 

 under which they could be studied! 



Microtechnique at that time was of course a much simpler 

 affair than it has since become. Contemporary papers as a rule 

 say little about methods ; however one of Henfrey's occasional 

 notes in a magazine tells us that caustic potash, iodine, sulphuric, 

 hydrochloric and acetic acids, together with ether were in common 

 use. Schultze's reagent chloride of zinc iodide was invented 

 in 1850, but does not appear to have been generally employed 

 till many years later. 



It would however be a serious error to underestimate the 

 value of the earlier work in plant histology. The present writer 

 once spent an interesting morning in Pfefifer's laboratory at 

 Tubingen rummaging through hundreds of the great von Mohl's 

 anatomical preparations. Among these were sections of palm 

 endosperms in which the, at that time recently discovered, con- 

 tinuity of the protoplasm through the cell walls was plainly 

 visible. The existence of these filaments had been detected 



