But nature has a speedier and more powerful instrument in the larger pores, which the microscope reveals. Mirbel does not discuss the question how the fluids are set in motion, easily disregarding such mechanical difficulties, as was usual in those days, when vital power was always in reserve to be the moving agent. He warmly repels the imputation, which Sprengel had made against him, of having confounded pores and granules, by appealing to his figures; he says that he has depicted prominences on the outside of the walls of the dotted vessels, and an orifice in each of them, which his opponents simply never saw. The question whether these prominences lie on the inside or the outside of the walls of the vessel has no meaning, if we suppose with Mirbel that the dividing wall is single; he is only concerned to enquire whether the perforated projections lie on the one or on the other side of the wall. He refers Treviranus, who had denied the presence of the pores, to his description of scalariform vessels, in which he had himself seen the slits which correspond to the pores. In comparison with these fundamental questions Mirbel’s further account of matters of detail does not concern us here. He gave a connected view of the whole of his doctrine of tissues in the form of aphorisms, which occupy the second part of his book. Of all that he says on the five kinds into which he distinguishes vessels the most interesting is the statement, that diaphragms pierced like a sieve separate the different members of his ‘beaded’ vessels. We find that the weakest part of Mirbel’s phytotomy, as of that of his opponents, is his description of the true vessels (vasa propria), with which he classes the milk-cells of the Euphorbiae and the resin-ducts of Coniferae, but he saw clearly enough that the latter were canals inclosed in a layer of tissue of their own. The third part of the book is devoted to these forms of tissue, and we learn that he classes not only many kinds of sieve-cell-bundles, but also true bast-fibres, as those of nettle and hemp, with his bundles of true vessels. Like his opponents he makes the growth in thickness in woody stems to be due to transformation of the inner layer of bast; but he gives a new turn to this view, which brings it nearer to the modern theory; during the period of vegetation a delicate tissue with large vessels is developed in Dicotyledons on the confines of the wood and the bark, and these augment the mass of the woody body, while a loose cellular tissue is formed on the other side, destined to replace the constant losses of the outer rind. To later phytotomists, who understood by the word cambium a thin layer of tissue constantly engaged in producing wood and rind, Mirbel’s otherwise indistinct conception of growth in thickness must have become more indistinct from his using the word cambium not for the layer of tissue afterwards so called, but for a highly ‘elaborated and purified