28 HISTORY OF BOTANY 



as a keen thinker. To him both Ray and Linnaeus owe 

 much, as we shall see when we come to consider the 

 achievements of these men. Jung may be regarded as 

 one of the first botanists of more recent times who studied 

 morphology apart from taxonomy. 



But morphology was not the only new department of 

 botany to make its appearance in the middle of the 

 seventeenth century. Lenses were coming into use as 

 aids to natural eyesight. The more intimate structure 

 of plant organs began to engage men's attention, and 

 along with the knowledge thus acquired arose a desire to 

 know what part the structures so revealed played in the 

 plant economy. Plant anatomy and physiology were 

 born, or rather reborn, but under vastly different con- 

 ditions from those that prevailed when Theophrastus 

 wrote his Enquiry. 



Robert Hooke deserves our attention, not because he 

 was a botanist (nowadays we would call him a micro- 

 scopist) but because he was the first to employ the term 

 " cell," and to recognise that vegetable tissues are composed 

 of cells. You must not, however, run away with the 

 idea that the word " cell " meant to Hooke what it means 

 to you ; far from it. Hooke had provided himself with 

 a " magnifying glass " and promptly set to work to 

 examine with its aid everything he could lay his hands 

 on, and then he wrote a thick volume which he called 

 Micrographia, or " some physiological descriptions of 

 minute bodies, made by magnifying glasses, with observa- 

 tions and inquiries thereon/' This tome appeared in 

 1665. It was during his microscopical examination of 

 charcoal, cork, and other plant tissues that he first recog- 

 nised that they were " all perforated and porous, much 

 like a honeycomb." To these pores he gave the name of 

 " cells," but the " interstitia," or cell walls, were not 

 regarded by Hooke as constituent parts of the cells at all. 

 I will quote to you one sentence only to show you that 

 Hooke did not separate in his mind the anatomical 



