150 THE MINUTE ANATOMISTS 



Anatomy of Plants. This was followed up a year later 

 by his fuller treatise, the Anatome Plantarum. Both 

 were published together in 1675, and a second part of 

 the Anatome in 1679. 



Most of the numerous figures which accompany the 

 Anatome Plantarum are good, some of them surprisingly 

 good ; we are often astonished that so early an investi- 

 gator should have seen so much and understood so well 

 what he saw.^ Some of these figures remained unintel- 

 ligible to botanists until the structures which they depict 

 were rediscovered in modern times. Malpighi shows 

 practical good sense in his choice of subjects, and also in 

 refraining from labour which would not tell. Other 

 naturalists. Grew for example, would laboriously draw 

 half or even the whole section of a stem ; Malpighi 

 is satisfied with a small sector. 



The text is by no means so good as the figures. False 

 analogies with animal structures and functions abound, 

 as in Aristotle and Cesalpini ; the spiral vessel reminds 

 Malpighi of an insect's air-tube and of a vertebrate 

 wind-pipe, which, regarded as an exploratory suggestion, 

 was natural and proper, but he goes on to infer that 

 spiral vessels are respiratory, calls the wood the thorax 

 of the plant, and compares the cells of a tylosis with 

 the air-cells of a lung ; he discovers a peristaltic motion 

 in the spiral vessels ; the ovary of the plant is an uterus, 

 and the cotyledons are placentas.^ There is a great 

 deal also of a Natur-philosophie, barren and delusive ; 



1 One would like to know for certain Avhether the beautiful drawings in red 

 chalk preserved by the Royal Society were executed by Malpighi's own hand 

 or not. In three separate places (preface to Anatomes Plantarum Idea, 

 Anatome Plantarum, and Opera posthuma, p. 18) he speaks of the figures 

 as having been drawn by himself, but it is of course possible that he handed 

 them over to a professional artist to be copied. 



2 But also leaves of the embryo-plant (seminalis plantula). 



