THE WALLFLOWER 2? 



does not run out, but only a little is lost. The juice 

 is contained in these little closed chambers, which 

 hold it fast, and only those which are actually opened 

 by the knife are emptied. 



Now these chambers, of which the whole substance, 

 of almost all plants consists, are called cells. They 

 are nearly always so small that they cannot be. 

 distinguished at all except under the microscope. 

 Few reach a diameter of yju of an inch, while many 

 measure only ToW of an inch, or less. The fact that 

 plants have a cellular structure is far from being a 

 modern discovery. Cells were discovered in plants 

 by Sober t Hooke 1 in 1667, and within the succeeding 

 fifteen years the internal structure of many plants 

 was worked out by Nehemiah Grew in England, and 

 Mar cello Malpighi in Italy. The early anatomists 

 were struck by the similarity of many vegetable, 

 tissues to the honeycomb of a bee, and they applied 

 the word "cell" to the chambers in both cases in the 

 same sense. 



From the time of Grew and Malpighi onwards until 

 well within the nineteenth century for a period, that 

 is, of quite a century and a half those botanists who 

 troubled themselves at all about internal structure, 

 attended chiefly to the walls of the cells. These aie. 

 much the most conspicuous features in the section 



1 See his Micrographia ; or, Some Physiological Descriptions of 

 Minute Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses, with Observations and 

 Enquiries thereupon (London, 1667), especially chapter xviii., "Of 

 the Schematisme or Texture of Cork, and of the Cells and Pores of; 

 some other such frothy Bodies." 



