66s PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO l6y2, 



A Letter from Mr, Martin Lister, York, January 10, 1671-2, con- 

 taining an ingenious Account of Feins, hy him observed in Plants, 

 analogous to Human Veins. N° 79, p- 3052. 



Sjr — I ^m very much pleased_, when you give me to understand, that some- 

 thing is published of the anatomy of. vegetables, and that more is designed by 

 that excellent person Signior Malpighi. And since the receipt of your last, I 

 have perused the very ingenious book of Dr. Grew; and, as far as I have ob- 

 served these matters, all things therein are faithfully delivered, and with great 

 sagacity. In turning over my notes, made some years ago, I find among other 

 things of this nature, some few observations concerning the veins of plants, 

 or such ducts as seem to contain and carry in them the noblest juices of 

 plants. Of these there is little or no mention made in this curious tract, 

 unless under the notion of pores. And because I am of opinion, that they 

 will prove vessels analogous to our human veins, and not mere pores, they 

 shall, if you please, be the subject of your entertainment in this letter ; and the 

 rather that, if they prove veins, as I little doubt them, they are not to be 

 passed over in silence, but are early to be accounted for in the anatomy of 

 vegetables. 



To avoid ambiguity; those parts of a plant, which Pliny (lib. l6, cap. 38,) 

 calls by the names of yense and pulpas, are nothing else, in my opinion, but 

 what our late author, Dr. Grew, calls fibres and insertments, or the ligneous 

 body interwoven with that which he takes to be the cortical, that is, the several 

 distinctions of the grain. Now that the vessels we are about to discourse of 

 are not any of the pores of the ligneous body, to use the doctor's terms, is plain 

 in a transverse cut of Angelica Sylvestris magna vulgatior J. B, for example; the 

 veins there very clearly show themselves, to an attentive view, to be distinct 

 from fibres, observable in the parenchyma of the same cortical body with them- 

 selves; the milky juice still rising beside and not in any fibre. Also in the like 

 cut of a burdoc in June, the like juice springs on this and on that side of the 

 radii of the woody circle, that is, in the cortical body and pith only. Again, 

 where there is no pith, there is none of this juice to be observed, and conse- 

 quently none of these veins, as in the roots of plants, and trunks of trees ; but 

 ever in the bark of either. I need not here enumerate the many plants, where- 

 in these particulars are most plainly observable, as in spondylium, cicutaria, 

 many of the thistle kind, &c. 



Neither are they probably of the number of the pores, described 'by our 

 author in the cortical body or pith. Not surely of those pores extended by the 



