86 Scientific Intelligence. 



Botany, but fully a century elapsed before this thought ripened 

 and became realized as "the anatomical method" nowadays 

 almost universally adopted in the scientific world. French 

 botanists, prominent among whom were Mirbel and Chatin, were 

 the first to take up the idea, that affinities and divergences in the 

 vegetable kingdom might be sought in the internal structure, and 

 the rapid increase in the number of genera and species made it 

 almost necessary to invent other characters than those supplied 

 by the study of morphology alone. In large genera it had, 

 already, become difficult to distinguish the species of closely allied 

 types satisfactorily, and although the very beginning of the 

 anatomical method was purely for the sake of applying the inter- 

 nal characters in the service of systematic work, the study of 

 plant-anatomy soon broadened into other lines, where the anatomy 

 became a branch of its own, making the first and principal found- 

 dation for development of physiological research. It is the most 

 rational development of science, when we look back at the work 

 of the earlier botanists, when they began to discriminate organs 

 of plants and compose the systems, and then gradually became 

 aware of natural groups of plants, until genera and species 

 became adopted as a means of expressing in brief the mutual 

 affinities. Then followed the doctrine of morphology, first as a 

 mere guide in systematic research, the terminology ; then it grad- 

 ually developed into the study of analogies and homologies 

 amongst the plant-organs themselves, while contemporarily ana- 

 tomical research was found to be useful for controlling the validity 

 of morphological identities. Soon anatomy was applied as an 

 aid in systematic work, and it is this branch of Botany which 

 Dr. Solereder has illustrated in his present book. 



In looking through the pages of this elaborate work, one gets 

 an idea of the history of the anatomical method from its begin- 

 ning to its present stage, and it is, really, an enormous quantity 

 of labor that has already been bestowed upon this line of 

 Botany. It seems as if the first, or at least the most effective, 

 impulse was given in the works of Radlkofer and Vesque, and 

 since then a number of other botanists have taken the subject up 

 with strenuous efforts to prove the validity of anatomical charac- 

 ters. And so far have we reached now in the last decennia that 

 no systematic work seems complete unless this method is consid- 

 ered. Engler's and Prantl's systematic treatise of the natural 

 orders is an excellent example of what great importance is 

 attributed to anatomical characters, and the results of such 

 studies are, really, twofold : they bring to light a number of 

 structural details, more or less applicable to demonstrate the 

 affinities between many genera and species, and, moreover, we 

 obtain by these same results an accumulation of data useful to 

 the understanding of the internal life of the plants, the structure 

 of the tissues, etc. From these may again be drawn con- 

 clusions as to the functions of the structural elements, their 

 necessity to plant-life. The study of anatomy became thus 



