it. The chief emphasis is laid on the consideration of the way in which the fibrous tissue connects with the succulent parenchyma, while such questions as the nature of the cell, the fibre, and the vessel are only incidentally touched upon or discussed at greater length in the course of the exposition. The mode of investigation and exposition is therefore chiefly analytic, while in modern compendiums of phytotomy it is essentially synthetic. It need scarcely be said that with this mode of treatment the questions which are now regarded as fundamentally important are either treated as of secondary moment, or are disregarded; we must not therefore, in judging of the merit of these men, approach their works with the demands upon them which our more advanced science would lead us to make. It would be quite wrong even to think of measuring the value of their books by the extent to which their contents agree with the modern cell-theory. Both of them had enough to do to find their way at all in the new world which the microscope had revealed; many questions which have become trivial for us had then to be solved for the first time, and the chief merit of both lies in this very effort to understand first of all the coarser relations of the anatomical structure of plants; in this respect the study of their works may yet be recommended to beginners, because modern phytotomical books are generally very imperfect on these points. And yet we must not undervalue what Malpighi and Grew had to say on the more delicate anatomy, and especially on the nature of the solid framework of cell-membrane in the plant; imperfect and crude as their views on such points may be, yet they continued for more than a hundred years to be the foundation of all that was known about cellular structure; and when phytotomy took a new flight at the beginning of the present century, Malpighi's and Grew's scattered remarks on the union of cells with one another, and on the structure of fibres and vessels, were adopted by the later phytotomists and connected with their own investigations.
