As in medicine in the 17th century human anatomy was intimately connected with physiology, and the latter was not yet treated as a distinct study, so the founders of phytotomy naturally combined the physiological consideration of the functions of organs with the examination of their structure. Considerations on the movement of sap and on food appear in the front of every anatomical enquiry; relations of structure, which the microscope could not reach, were assumed hypothetically on physiological grounds, although little positive was known at the time about the functions of the organs of plants; hence recourse was had to analogies between vegetable and animal life, and it is true that vegetable physiology received its first great impulse by this means, but occasion was given at the same time to many errors, which in their turn often misled the anatomist. At present, when vegetable anatomy has separated itself more than is desirable from physiology, that is, from the investigation of the functions of organs, it is difficult, nay impossible, to give the reader a brief account of the contents of these two books which form an epoch in the science. I must confine myself to noticing a few chief points, which are historically connected with the further development of phytotomy, though some of these are just the questions to which Malpighi and Grew only gave occasional attention, and which it is therefore a little unjust to them to bring into prominent notice. I shall recur to the physiological portion of their writings in the third book of this history, confining myself here to that which concerns the structural relations of plants. The phytotomical work of MARCELLO MALPIGHI[65] appeared under the title ‘Anatome Plantarum,’ and to it was added a treatise on hens’ eggs during the process of incubation (1675). The phytotomical portion of the book separates into two main divisions, the first of which, the ‘Anatomes Plantarum idea,’ was, as was stated above, completed in 1671, and contains a general abstract and survey of Malpighi’s views on the structure and functions of vegetable organs in fourteen-and-a-half folio pages; the second and much larger portion illustrates in detail by numerous examples and with the help of many copper-plates the views expressed in the first part; it will answer our purpose best to turn principally to the connected expression of the author’s views in the first part.