166 THE MINUTE ANATOMISTS 



that in several diflferent directions he had outstripped 

 all competitors. 



NEHEMIAH GEEW 



1641-1712 



The Anatomy of Vegetables begun. 8vo. Lend. 1672. 

 The Anatomy of Plants. Fol. Lond. 1682. 



The botanist Grew was son to the Puritan minister of 

 St. Michael's, Coventry, one of those ejected in 1662. 

 Like Ray, he was a pious man, who thought it a duty 

 to trace the hand of God in the visible creation, and it 

 was this which caused him to attend to the structure of 

 plants. Wilkins, afterwards bishop of Chester, one of 

 the founders of the Royal Society, brought Grew's work 

 under the notice of his colleagues, who encouraged him 

 to print his first book. He removed to London, and set 

 up as a physician there ; he served as secretary to the 

 Society in 1677. His communications to the Society 

 formed the basis of separate publications, and these, 

 corrected and expanded by further reflection as well 

 as by hints taken from Malpighi,^ were at length 

 collected into a folio volume, called The Anatomy of 

 Plants. 



The Anatomy of Vegetables begun, which ultimately 

 formed the first part of the Anatomy of Plants, is an 

 8vo book of 198 pages, with three folding plates. 

 Chapter I describes the germinating seed of the garden 

 bean. Then we go on to the trunk (stem), the germen 



' The publications of Malpighi and Grew on plant-structure are sometimes 

 almost simultaneous, and it is often hard to decide which was the first to 

 observe a fact of special interest. Questions of priority are not raised by 

 either ; in the seventeenth or early eighteenth century it was not the practice 

 to acknowledge help received from other authors. Loeke and Newton do not 

 quote Bacon, nor Galileo Kepler, nor Descartes Kepler or De Dominis, nor 

 Spinoza Hobbes. Linnaeus is very careless about debts of this kind. 



