then became a member of the senate, and his party only regained ascendancy in 1870. The extreme clerical ministry of Baron d’Anethan retired in December 1871 after serious rioting in Brussels, and Malou was the real, though not the nominal, head of the more moderate clerical administrations of de Theux and Aspremont-Lynden (1870–1878). He was wise enough to disavow the noisy sympathy of Belgian Ultramontane politicians with the German victims of the Kulturkampf, and, retaining in his own hands the portfolio of finance, he subordinated his clerical policy to a useful administration in commercial matters, including a development of the railway system. It was only after the fall of the ministry in 1878 that he adopted a frankly clerical policy, and when he became chief of a new government in June 1884 he proceeded to undo the educational compromise of his predecessors in the Frère-Orban ministry. His legislation in favour of the Catholic schools caused rioting in Brussels, and in October the king demanded the retirement of MM. Jacobs and Woeste, the members of the cabinet against whom popular indignation was chiefly directed. Malou followed them into retirement, and died at Woluwe Saint Lambert, in Brabant, on the 11th of July 1886. He was a financier of great knowledge and experience, and his works (of which a long list is given in Koninck’s Bibliographie nationale de Belgique) include three series (1874–1880) of memoirs on financial questions, edited by him for the Chamber of Deputies, besides pamphlets on railroad proposals, mining and other practical questions. His brother Jean Baptiste Malou (1809–1864) was a well-known divine.
MALOUET, PIERRE VICTOR, Baron (1740–1814), French
publicist and politician, was born at Riom (Puy-de-Dôme) on the
11th of February 1740, the son of a lawyer. He entered the
civil service and was employed successively at the French embassy
in Lisbon, in the administrative department of the duc de
Broglie’s army, as commissary in San Domingo from 1767–1774,
and, after his return to France, as commissary-general of the
marine. In 1776 he was entrusted to carry out plans of colonization
in French Guiana, but was superseded in 1779. On his
return to France he was well received at court, and the execution
of his plans in Guiana was assured. He became intendant of
the port of Toulon, and in 1789 was returned to the states-general,
where he soon became well known as a defender of the
monarchical principle. He emigrated to England in September,
1792, but shortly afterwards sought in vain permission to return
to assist in the defence of Louis XVI. His name was erased from
the list of emigrants in 1801 by Napoleon, who restored him to
his position in the service and sent him to Antwerp as commissioner-general
and maritime prefect to superintend the
erection of defence works, and the creation of a fleet. He
entered the council of state in 1810, but, having offended the
emperor by his plainness of speech, he was disgraced in 1812.
At the Restoration, Louis XVIII. made him minister of marine;
and he died on the 7th of September 1814.
The most important documents for his domestic and colonial policy are a Collection de ses opinions à l’Assemblée Nationale (3 vols., 1791–1792); and Collection de mémoires et correspondances officielles sur l’administration des colonies et notamment sur la Guiane française et hollandaise (5 vols., 1802).
MALPIGHI, MARCELLO (1628–1694), Italian physiologist,
was born at Crevalcuore near Bologna, on the 10th of March
1628. At the age of seventeen he began the study of philosophy;
it appears that he was also in the habit of amusing himself with
the microscope. In 1649 he started to study medicine; after
four years at Bologna he graduated there as doctor. He at
once applied to be admitted to lecture in the university, but it
was not till after three years (1656) that his request was granted.
A few months later he was appointed to the chair of theoretical
medicine at Pisa, where he enjoyed the friendship and countenance
of G. A. Borelli. At the end of four years he left Pisa,
on the ground of ill-health, and returned to Bologna. A call
to be professor primarius at Messina (procured for him through
Borelli, who had in the meantime become professor there)
induced him to leave Bologna in 1662. His engagement at
Messina was for a term of four years, at an annual stipend of
1000 scudi. An attempt was made to retain him at Messina
beyond that period, but his services were secured for his native
university, and he spent the next twenty-five years there. In
1691, being then in his sixty-fourth year, and in failing health,
he removed to Rome to become private physician to Pope
Innocent XII., and he died there of apoplexy three years later,
on the 30th of November 1694. Shortly before his death, he
drew up a long account of his academical and scientific labours,
correspondence and controversies, and committed it to the charge
of the Royal Society of London, a body with which he had
been in intimate relations for more than twenty years. The autobiography,
along with some other posthumous writings, was
published in London in 1696, at the cost of the Society. The
personal details left by Malpighi are few and dry. His narrative
is mainly occupied with a summary of his scientific contributions
and an account of his relations to contemporary anatomists,
and is entirely without graces of style or elements of ordinary
human interest.
Malpighi was one of the first to apply the microscope to the study of animal and vegetable structure; and his discoveries were so important that he may be considered to be the founder of microscopic anatomy. It was his practice to open animals alive, and some of his most striking discoveries were made in those circumstances. Although Harvey had correctly inferred the existence of the capillary circulation, he had never seen it; it was reserved for Malpighi in 1661 (four years after Harvey’s death) to see for the first time the marvellous spectacle of the blood coursing through a network of small tubes on the surface of the lung and of the distended urinary bladder of the frog. We are enabled to measure the difficulties of microscopic observation at the time by the fact that it took Malpighi four years longer to reach a clear understanding of the corpuscles in the frog’s blood, although they are the parts of the blood by which its movement in the capillaries is made visible. His discovery of the capillary circulation was given to the world in the form of two letters De Pulmonibus, addressed to Borelli, published at Bologna in 1661 and reprinted at Leiden and other places in the years following; these letters contained also the first account of the vesicular structure of the human lung, and they made a theory of respiration for the first time possible. The achievement that comes next both in importance and in order of time was a demonstration of the plan of structure of secreting glands; against the current opinion (revived by F. Ruysch forty years later) that the glandular structure was essentially that of a closed vascular coil from which the secretion exuded, he maintained that the secretion was formed in terminal acini standing in open communication with the ducts. The name of Malpighi is still associated with his discovery of the soft or mucous character of the lower stratum of the epidermis, of the vascular coils in the cortex of the kidney, and of the follicular bodies in the spleen. He was the first to attempt the finer anatomy of the brain, and his descriptions of the distribution of grey matter and of the fibre-tracts in the cord, with their extensions to the cerebrum and cerebellum, are distinguished by accuracy; but his microscopic study of the grey matter conducted him to the opinion that it was of glandular structure and that it secreted the “vital spirits.” At an early period he applied himself to vegetable histology as an introduction to the more difficult study of the animal tissues, and he was acquainted with the spiral vessels of plants in 1662. It was not till 1671 that he wrote his Anatome plantarum and sent it to the Royal Society, who published it in the following year. An English work under a similar title (Anatomy of Vegetables) had been published in London a few months earlier, by Nehemiah Grew; so that Malpighi’s priority as a vegetable histologist is not so incontestable as it is in animal histology. The Anatome plantarum contained an appendix, Observations de ovo incubato, which gave an account (with good plates) of the development of the chick (especially of the later stages) in many points more complete than that of Harvey, although the observations were needlessly lessened in value by being joined to the metaphysical notion of “praedelineation” in the undeveloped ovum.
He also wrote Epistolae anatomicae Marc. Malpighii et Car. Fracassati (Amsterdam, 1662) (on the tongue, brain, skin, omentum, &c.); De viscerum structura: exercitatio anatomica (London, 1669); De structura glandularum conglobatarum (London, 1689); Opera posthuma, et vita a seipso scripta (London, 1697; another edition, with preface and additions, was published at Amsterdam in 1700.). An edition containing all his works except the last two was published in London in 1687, in 2 vols. folio, with portrait and plates.
MALPLAQUET, a village of France in the department of
the Nord, close to the Belgian frontier and about 10 miles S. by
E. of Mons, famous as the scene of the battle, September 1709,
between the Allies under the duke of Marlborough and Prince
