CHAPTER I.
Phytotomy Founded by Malpighi and Grew.
1671–1682
The foundation of vegetable anatomy, indeed of all insight into the structure of the substance of plants, is the knowledge of their cellular structure. We find the first perception of this truth in a comprehensive work of Robert Hooke[1], which appeared in London in 1667 under the title of 'Micrographia or some physiological descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifying glasses.' The author of this remarkable book was not a botanist, but an investigator of nature of the kind more especially to be found in the seventeenth century; he was mathematician, chemist, physicist, a great mechanician, and later an architect, and moreover a philosopher of the new school then rising. Beside many discoveries in various subjects he succeeded in 1660 in so far improving the compound microscope, that with considerable increase in magnifying power it had tolerably clear definition. With this instrument Henshaw in 1661 is stated to have discovered the vessels in walnut-wood, a fact not of importance for our history. Hooke himself was anxious to show the world how much could be seen with his
- ↑ Robert Hooke, born in 1635 at Freshwater in the Isle of Wight, was a man of marvellous industry and varied acquirement in spite of a delicate constitution. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1662, and was afterwards its Secretary and Professor of Geometry in Gresham College. He died in 1703. There is a good account of him by de l'Aulnaye in the 'Biographie Universelle.'
