But the light must have its attendant shadow, and all his
carefulness in observation and cautiousness in judgment
did not protect him from one prejudice and its evil consequences. After Moldenhawer had isolated the elementary
organs by maceration, he had to answer the question how we
are to conceive of their firm coherence in the living plant. He
came to the conclusion, as did von Mohl, Schacht, and others after
him, that there must be some special connecting medium; but
he did not hit upon their idea of a matrix, in which the cells
are imbedded, or of a cement which holds them together, but
on a much stranger theory, which reminds us at once of Grew's
thread-tissue, and like that rests partly on incorrect observations. These were too hastily accepted as the basis of a
theory which in its turn interfered with after observations.
He thought that the cells and vessels were surrounded and
held together by an extremely delicate net-work of fine fibres;
in some cases he really believed that he saw these fibres, and
interpreted in this way the thickened bands in the well-known
cells of Sphagnum, and still more strangely he appears to have
taken the thickened longitudinal and transverse edges of cells
and vessels for such threads. The unfavourable impression
produced by this theory is necessarily heightened by the fact
that he gave the name of cell-tissue, a term long used in a different sense, to his fancy-structure of reticulated threads which
were to hold the cells and vessels together, while he called the
parenchyma itself cellular substance, an expression which fortunately no one copied, and which certainly contributed at a
later time to discredit the great services which Moldenhawer
rendered to phytotomy.
His 'Beitrage zur Anatomic der Pflanzen' are divided into two portions; the first treats of the parts surrounding the spiral vessels ; the second of the spiral vessels themselves.
The position and collective form of the component parts of the vascular bundle in the stem of the maize-plant are well described in the first section of the work. It is correctly stated
