On some recent progress in our knowledge 
of the Anatomy of Plants’. 
BY 
D. H. SCOTT, M.A., Ph.D., F.L.S., 
Assistant Professor in Botany , Normal School of Science and Royal School 
of Mines. 
I N plants, Anatomy, which may be denned generally as the 
study of internal structure, cannot be sharply separated 
from Histology. The investigation of the coarser structure, 
though a necessary preliminary, would be wholly barren with- 
out a knowledge of the tissues of which the organs of plants 
are composed, for it is to special tissues, and often even to 
isolated cells, that special functions are attached. Take, for 
example, the fibro-vascular bundles, no idea of the numerous 
functions which they discharge could be formed without a 
knowledge of their minute structure. 
In this paper, however, the finer Histology, relating to 
details of structure of the individual cell, will be excluded. 
The anatomy of plants is a branch of botany in which 
Englishmen may claim a special interest. Nehemiah Grew’s 
‘Anatomy of Plants/ 1682, is a wonderful record of early 
microscopic research, and it is interesting that the ‘ Anatome 
Plantarum 5 of his Italian contemporary, Malpighi, was com- 
municated to the Royal Society of London. 
It is, however, only with the recent progress of the subject 
that we are now concerned. 
As regards the vegetative anatomy of the higher plants, we 
may take de Bary’s great work, published in 1877, as our 
1 Read before Section D at the Newcastle meeting of the British Association for 
the Advancement of Science. 
[Annals of Botany, Vol. IV. No. XIII. November, 1889.] 
L 2 
