176 Some account Amici's Discoveries 
♦ 
sufficiently confirmed,) that by means of this agent, (galvanism,) 
water may be conducted over from the positive to the negative 
pole, raised, contrary to all the laws of hydraulics, above the 
level, and brought through the pores of a bladder, which, but 
/ for it, are otherwise impermeable. 
It is rather remarkable that another natural philosopher was 
engaged in these curious and delicate investigations at the 
same time with Amici, and with the very same plant, and 
published the result of his observations in the same year. 
We allude to that eminent German botanist, Dr Martins, 
(at present naturalist to the King of Bavaria in the Brazils,) 
who, in the year 1815, wrote a treatise on the structure and 
the nature of the Char os ^ which was read at the Royal Aca- 
demy at Munich, and printed in the Transactions of the 
Leopoldine-Carolinian Academy of Naturalists (Nova Acta 
Physico-medica vol. i. Erlangen, 1818, 4to. Dr Martins in- 
vestigated the internal organization not only of the Chara vul- 
garis^ (to which the experiments of Amici were confined,) but 
also of the Chara Jtexiiis and Mspida ; and he has communi- 
cated his observations very minutely in the memoir to which we 
have alluded, and to which we must at present refer our read- 
ers. 
Previous to the experiments of Amici and Martins, Professor 
Treviranus of Bremen had made similar observations on the 
motion of the sap in these plants, but without attempting to 
ascribe it to the same principle which is adopted in Amici’s hy- 
pothesis ‘^5 
The preceding observations derive still greater importance 
from the circumstance, that Professor Amici thinks he has dis- 
covered a similar organization in various other plants, particu- 
larly the Tropceolum mqjus and Humulus lupulus, which he exa- 
mined for the purpose of investigating the porous tubes, discover- 
ed by Mirbel, and observed by other vegetable physiologists ; 
and he also thinks himself justified in believing, that the small 
granular substances which Sprengel found in the cells of some 
plants, and which frequently exhibit a regular position, are in 
* See Observations on the of the granular substance in some Conferva, 
and one Chara, in Weber’s Contributions to Natural History^ vol. ii. Kiel, 1810, 
