the small, almost spherical crystals of oxide of iron with the minute, spherical articulations of Ehrenberg's Gallionella ferruginea, which likewise consist almost exclusively of oxide of iron, and undeniably represent organic forms, either animal or vegetable: the crude antithesis disappears at once, and all who reflect will conceive for science the possibility, still distant, of bringing the formation of both kinds under the same law of nature. There are in nature thousands of these apparent leaps, like that from the inorganic to the organism, in regard to which attentive observation will reveal to us gradual differences instead of a specific distinction."
This work excited a wide-spread and virulent opposition in consequence of the bitterness of its polemics, its severe criticisms of the didactic methods of investigation and the dry systems in vogue at the time, and its sharp personalities. The book was called libelous in France, for the author, according to Dr. Karl Midler, seemed to speak well of no one except Robert Brown and Hugh Mohl, "the two living men whom he most admired," and was not sparing in his criticisms of them. "With incomparable acuteness, and with equal acerbity against living and dead, he poured out such a flood of botanical satires and personal antipathies that he would have had to be a god to escape the reaction against his attacks; and the day when this was to take place was not long in coming." Yet, he did not let his vehement criticisms go forth without making an excuse for them. It was that "enough merit still exists among true naturalists to permit us to leave the business of mutual admiration to the literary beggars of belles-lettres journalism." Notwithstanding this opposition, the current in favor of Schleiden's conception of the object of scientific study could not be diverted; and the medical faculty of Tubingen, one of whose members was Schleiden's most eminent opponent in a number of special cases, replied to his acrid charges by conferring upon him its honorary degree.
Schleiden's other book, "Die Pflanze und ihr Leben" ("The Plant and its Life"), the object of which was to popularize botany, had a brilliant success. The first edition of 1848 was rapidly followed by other editions, and the work appeared in the course of the next ten years in one French, one Dutch, and two English translations. The author, in the preface to this work, defines his object as follows: "Most people of the world, even the most enlightened, are still in the habit of regarding the botanist as a dealer in barbarous Latin names, as a man who gathers flowers, names them, dries them, and wraps them in paper, and all of whose wisdom consists in determining and classifying this hay which he has collected with such great pains. This portrait of the botanist was, alas! recently true; but, now that it is no longer applicable to the majority among us, I have been grieved to see that many still hold to it. So I have endeavored in these lectures to place within the reach of all the real principles of botanical science, and to
