losis), which Malpighi figures Tab. vi, fig. 21, but the true nature of which was not understood till 150 years later. Malpighi, like succeeding phytotomists till as late as 1830, lays great stress on the structure of the spiral vessels or tracheae, and mentions particularly that they are surrounded by a sheath of woody fibre; but he did not fall into the strange notions which Grew and other phytotomists entertained with regard to the nature of these vessels.
We may at present omit the numerous remarks on assimilation and the movement of the sap; the descriptions and figures of the parts of buds and of the course of the bundles of vessels in different parts of plants, and especially the analyses of the flower and fruit and the examination of the seed and embryo, conducted with a carefulness remarkable for that time, deserve a fuller notice, but this would detain us too long from our main subject.
If Malpighi's work reads like a masterly sketch in which the author is bent only on giving the outlines of the architecture of plants, the much more comprehensive work of Nehemiah Grew[1], 'The anatomy of plantes' (1682), has the appearance of a text-book of the subject thoroughly worked out in all its details; the tasteful elegance of Malpighi is here replaced by a copiousness of minute detail that is often too diffuse; while in Malpighi we only occasionally encounter the philosophical prejudices of his time, which usually lead him into mistakes, Grew's treatise is everywhere interwoven with the philosophical and theological notions of the England of that day; but we are compensated for this by the more systematic way in which he pursues the train of thought, and especially by the constant
- ↑ Nehemiah Grew, the son of a clergyman in Coventry, appears to have been born in 1628. Having taken a Doctor's degree in a foreign University, he practised as a physician in his native town, and pursued at the same time his phytotomical researches. He became Secretary to the Royal Society in 1677, and published his 'Cosmographia Sacra' in 1701. He died in 1711. See the 'Biographie Universelle.'
