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MARCELLUS MALPIGHI. 



1628-1661. 



MALPIGHI was born at Crevalcore, near Bologna, 

 in 1628, the year in which Harvey published his 

 Exercitatio. Entering the University of Bologna in 1645, 

 he took his degree in Medicine in 1653. In 1656 he obtained a 

 Professorship there, but in the same year Ferdinand II., Grand Duke 

 of Tuscany, created for him a special Chair of Institutes of Medicine 

 in Pisa, which he held for three years. Borelli, his senior by twenty 

 years, was also in Pisa, and the two became warm friends, Malpighi 

 profiting from the knowledge of the " new learning," and Borelli in 

 turn acquiring a knowledge of anatomy. 



Malpighi retured to Bologna, where he remained for a short time. 

 In 1662 he was invited to occupy the Chair of Medicine in Messina, 

 and he accepted the offer. After four years, i.e. in 1666, his fame was 

 such that his old University of Bologna invited him to return. He 

 was invited by Innocent XII. in 1691 to become his physician. He 

 died in Rome 1624, set. 67, and was buried in the Church of St. Gregory 

 in Bologna. 



It is not possible here to do justice to the work of Malpighi, for 

 his discoveries are not only numerous and epoch-making, but range 

 over both the animal and vegetable kingdom. It was in Sicily that 

 his attention was first directed to the structure of plants. The 

 microscope was already in use, and Malpighi used it with marvellous 

 success. His immortal work on plants, Anatome Plantarum, 

 published by the Royal Society, and that of Dr. Nathaniel Grew, also 

 published by the Royal Society, laid the foundation of Vegetable 

 Morphology. It is for this reason and others that I have placed the 

 portraits of Malpighi and Dr. Grew on the same plate. Malpighi was 

 the contemporary of Harvey, Borelli, Stensen whom he met in Rome 

 on his return from Messina, Redi, Rudbeck, and Bartholin, a galaxy 

 of discoverers. 



To his friend Borelli in 1660 he had communicated his researches on 

 the structure of the lungs, and in 1661 he addressed his Observationes 

 Anatomicw de Pulmonibus (Bonon. 1661), to him. We leave aside the 

 story of their differences, of the uncertain temper of Borelli, and all that 

 belongs to "personal equations." The use of the microscope opened up 

 new paths and led to new ideas. Malpighi described how the air-tubes 

 open into air vesicles in the lungs. This observation made possible a 

 theory of respiration, but the great fact was not yet clear. He studied 

 at first the lungs of a dog. One cannot help reflecting how Harvey with 



