compositions; he actually did so, and the important point as regards the question of priority is, that where he makes use of Malpighi he distinctly quotes from him. No more is necessary to remove the serious imputation which Schleiden has made against Grew in the ‘Grundzüge’ (1845), i. p. 207. Whoever has not himself read the elaborate works of Malpighi and Grew, but knows them only from the quotations in later phytotomists, may easily imagine that these fathers of phytotomy had found their way to a theory of the cell, such as we now possess. But it is not so; their works have very little resemblance to modern descriptions of vegetable anatomy; the difference lies chiefly in this, that modern writers in their accounts of the structure of plants start with the idea of the cell, and afterwards treat of the connection of cells into masses of tissue. The founders of phytotomy on the contrary, as might naturally be expected, consider first and foremost the coarser anatomical circumstances; they describe the rind, bast, wood, and pith chiefly of woody dicotyledons, and the histological distinctions between root, stem, leaf, and fruit in their broader relations, and examine the detail of the structure of buds, flowers, fruits, and seeds for the most part only so far as it can be seen with the naked eye. The more delicate structural conditions are afterwards discussed as a supplement to this less minute anatomy and always in close connection with 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