membranous pellicles, so connected together that they form little
cavities or small cells and often reticulated by the intervention of
fine threads, form the cell-tissue which we see pervading all parts
of plants. These are what Malpighi and others call tubes, since they
appear in different parts in the form of rows of connected vesicles!’
Boehmer’s ‘Dissertatio de celluloso contextu’ (1785) is still worse;
‘White elastic thicker or thinner fibres and threads woven together
of differing shape and size form cavities or cells or caverns, and
are usually known by the name of cell-tissue.’ We see what mischief
Grew did with his theory of the fibrous structure of the cell-walls,
and how the expression cell-tissue literally taken led the botanists
here named and others into utterly incorrect ideas. The works of Du
Hamel, Comparetti, and Senebier show that such misconceptions were not
confined to Germany, and Hill, a countryman of Grew, according to von
Mohl’s account pictured to himself cells as cups standing one above
another, closed below and open above.
Baron von Gleichen-Russworm (1717-1783), privy counsellor to the
Margrave of Anspach, gave much attention to the perfecting of the
mechanical arrangements of the microscope, but his plates themselves
show how strangely unsuitable these arrangements were. With these
instruments he made many observations, which are recorded in two
voluminous works, ‘Das Neueste aus dem Reich der Pflanzen’ (1764)
and ‘Auserlesene mikroskopische Entdeckungen’ (1777-1781). But these
works contain little or nothing about microscopic anatomy or the
structure of vegetable cells. His observations with the microscope
are chiefly devoted to processes of fertilisation and to proving that
spermatozoa are contained in the pollen[69], and in connection with
these subjects he gives magnified figures of many small flowers, some
of them beautifully executed; these figures must have made his works
very instructive to many in their time. He saw the stomata, which Grew
had already discovered, on the leaves of ferns, but took them for the
male organs of fertilisation, which at the same time showed that he was
still unacquainted with the existence of stomata in phanerogams.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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