Chap, ii.] of Plants. Mariottc. 461 



laid in the anatomy of the plant. Grew, who in all essential 

 points adopted Malpighi's views, but without doing much t<> 

 advance them by his lengthy discussions on particular ques- 

 tions, made some attempt to extend the knowledge of the 

 chemistry of the subject ; but his notions were entirely 

 borrowed from the corpuscular theory of Descartes, and 

 he may be said to have constructed his own chemical pro- 

 cesses ; the consequence was that he usually overlooked the 

 points that were of fundamental importance, and brought 

 nothing to light that could assist the further development of 

 the theory of nutrition. But there is another writer, whose 

 name is in the present day known to few in the history of 

 vegetable physiology, but whose ideas on the chemistry of 

 plants are of great interest. This writer is Mariotte l , the 

 discoverer of the well-known law of gases, one of the greatest 

 physicists of the latter half of the 17th century, who also 

 enriched the physiology of the human body with some 

 valuable discoveries. We have a tolerably copious treatise 

 of Mariotte's in the form of a letter to a M. Lantin in the 

 year 1679, to be found in the ' GEuvres de Mariotte,' Leyden, 

 1 71 7, under the title, 'Sur le sujet des plantes.' It is highly 

 instructive to gather from this letter the ideas of one of the 

 most famous and ablest of the natural philosophers of that day 

 on chemical processes and conditions in the nutrition of plants, 

 a few years after the appearance of Malpighi's great work and 

 about the time that Grew's Phytotomy was being published. 

 It is to be expected that Mariotte should give but an incidental 

 and superficial attention to the more delicate structure of 



1 The date of the birth of Edme Mariotte is not known. He 

 native of Burgundy, and lived in Dijon at the time of his earliest scientific 

 labours. He was an ecclesiastic and became Prior of St. Ma::. 

 Beaune near Dijon ; he was a Member of the Academy of Sciences in Tans 

 from its foundation in 1666, and was one of the first Frenchmen who 

 experimented in physics and applied mathematics to them. He died in 

 Paris in 1684 (< Biographie Universale '). 



