ON THE ANATOMY OF DKUGS. 
409 
rest, and become, as it were, independent. Thus, many years elapsed during 
which earnest microscopists employed themselves in collecting facts concerning 
the tissues of plants before any work on structural botany could be produced. 
The mere fact of the publication of a work on the subject, showed that suffi¬ 
cient knowledge had been obtained to lay the basis of a fresh division of the 
study of plants,—a division comprising the phenomena which could only be 
noted by means of magnifying glasses. 
In the course of time structural botany has become, through successive addi¬ 
tions, so vast a field, that it, in its turn, becomes subject to the same process 
of subdivision into sections, to meet the requirements of the specialist; for men 
no longer claim to be universal philosophers, but each is content to take his own 
little portion of science and work it out exhaustively. In this way, objects 
scarcely considered of sufficient importance to be worth notice in the text-books 
of a past generation, become, in the present, the subjects of monographs, many 
of which, from their magnitude and elaborateness, might seem to contain the 
work of a lifetime. 
The publication of Dr. Otto Berg’s ‘Anatomical Atlas of Pharmaceutical 
Substances,’* a work to which we shall, after awhile, ask the reader’s attention, 
marks the point of development such as that just indicated. It is not that the 
observations of which the ‘ Atlas ’ is a record are entirely or even chiefly new, 
nor that in many cases more reliable information might not be found in books 
on general Materia Medica, but it is to the simple fact that it is a work devoted 
solely to the elucidation of the structure of pharmaceutical substances, that its 
importance appears to us to rest. Our knowledge of the subject was previously 
represented by the scattered observations of a multitude of writers, and, like a 
book of reference without an index, we scarcely knew either its amount or its 
value. The collecting and orderly arrangement of already known facts have 
been but one portion of the labour entailed in the production of the volume; 
not only was much needed in verifying previously published statements and 
drawings, but there still remained large gaps representing hitherto unexplored 
ground, and the original matter needed to complete the series is supplied from 
the author’s own researches. 
We shall be better able to form a proper estimate of the labours of Dr. Berg, 
if we make a preliminary acquaintance with those of some of our earlier scien¬ 
tific writers, who included in their more general treatises passing notices on the 
same or similar subjects. We must not turn to the works of Gerard, or Parkin¬ 
son, or Culpepper, or the other compilers of quaint and ponderous herbals, the 
forerunners of our manuals of Materia Medica, but rather to the dissertations 
of the early microscopists, notably to those of Hooke, and Grew, and Baker, and 
Adams, if we would see the beginnings of the study of which this ‘ Atlas ’ may 
said to mark the result of two centuries’ growth. 
First of all, not only in point of date, but also in importance, the ‘ Micro- 
graphia ’ of Robert Hooke f attracts our attention—a delightful folio, wherein 
it is hard to say whether the wonderfully beautiful plates, the vigorous English 
descriptions, or the drollery of some of the chapters, most excite our admiration. 
Amongst the numerous substances wffiose structure he studied, we find about 
half-a-dozen that may be regarded as pharmaceutical. The most prominent 
are rosemary leaves, cork, cowhage, charcoal (that prepared from guaiacum 
wood is particularly noticed), poppy-seeds, and sponge. His chapter “ Of the 
* Anatomisclier Atlas zur Phamiazeutisclien Waarenkunde, in Illustrationen anf fvinfzig 
in Kreidemanier litliographierten Tafeln nebst erlduterndem Texte von Dr, Otto Berg, Pro¬ 
fessor an der Universitat zu Berlin. Berlin, 1805. 
f Micrograpliia: or, some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies made by Magnify¬ 
ing Glasses, with Observations and Inquiries thereupon. By B. Hooke, Fellow of the Koyal 
Society. London, 1667, 
VOL. VIII. 2 E 
