164 THE MINUTE ANATOMISTS 



ESTIMATE OF MALPIGHI 



Malpighi was above all things a physiologist, but his 

 physiology was of that unspecialised kind which is pro- 

 secuted in an age when hardly any branches of science 

 have been pushed far. From the study of man and the 

 higher animals he passed quite easily to the study of 

 insects ; plants then seemed to him an attractive and 

 practicable field of investigation ; he only regretted that 

 he had not time to attend to chemistry and mineralogy 

 as well. He was skilled in anatomy, but his distinctive 

 merit among contemporary physiologists was his con- 

 tinual resort to the microscope. He was a close observer, 

 and whatever he saw he pondered over, but experiment 

 was not his strong side. 



His own generation was not competent to follow up 

 all the work of Malpighi. In human anatomy and 

 physiology, indeed, a body of trained students already 

 existed, and his discoveries were not sufi"ered to fall to 

 the ground. Of his contributions to these sciences I 

 have not ventured to speak at length ; they doubtless 

 constitute his greatest claim to the respect of later ages. 

 The treatise De Bomhyce inaugurated a new study, that 

 of insect anatomy, which was to be prosecuted with 

 greater power by Swammerdam. Malpighi's admirable 

 work in embryology was for the time unproductive ; only 

 after a long interval was it resumed by Haller, Wolff, 

 Pander, and Baer. Notwithstanding the merit of his 

 observations on the structure of plants, they fell upon 

 unprepared ground, and it may be doubted whether 

 they did much real good. Their seeming completeness 

 and their general agreement with the teaching of Grew, 

 led men to the totally unfounded belief that the organs 

 and functions of plants had now been effectively dealt 



